Rethinking Legacy Systems
New technologies from Databorough enable legacy systems to be managed with modern techniques, or reused to cost-effectively deploy new systems.
The end result is
- Extending system lifetimes years into the future, thereby deferring expensive replacement costs, or
- Reducing the costs of deploying new systems by enabling the recovery and reuse of long-proven business rules and data models, potentially saving up to millions of dollars.
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Sections for Reading About Rethinking Legacy Systems
Case Studies
Strategic Reengineering of RPG to J2EE on the IBM i
Exposing Legacy RPG System Business Rules for Users and Analysts
Creating a SQL Database and Data Access Layer from a Legacy System
Extracting Design Information to Automate Mass Maintenance
More Readings
Extracting Intelligence
Sharing Legacy Knowledge in an Organization
Simplifying Complexity
Reducing Effort
Case Studies
Strategic Reengineering of RPG to J2EE on the IBM i
Davies Turner & Co. is engaged in modernizing strategic portions of their traditional legacy applications into J2EE-MVC applications from RPG. Using Databorough’s X-Migrate they extract the business logic from the legacy RPG programs and produce business logic modules, and JSF’s/Servlets and JAVA I/O beans for a complete modernization into J2EE for these applications. A large portion of the refactoring is totally automated and has enabled Davies Turner to leverage the 15 years of investment in development and maintenance in their RPG applications.
Two years ago their development staff were skeptical and reluctant to move onto Java development on the iSeries. Being able to produce J2EE Websphere projects from legacy applications with X-Migrate, and then cross-referencing JAVA and RPG together using X-Analysis:Eclipse, has completely changed this attitude. The developers are now excited about current and future work and Davies Turner can continue to exploit its long standing investment in iSeries for many years to come.
Exposing Legacy RPG System Business Rules for Users and Analysts
Mapics, as many people may be familiar with, is a full-featured, highly complex ERP software product consisting of over 50 million lines of code.
Providing support to customers typically involved using programmers to analyze programs to prepare responses to user questions. Using X-Analysis Business Rule Extraction, support personnel are now able to quickly research business rules that relate to user questions and problem tickets. X-Analysis further simplifies their task by providing clear, user-friendly documentation that can be delivered directly to users in a language that they can understand.
For product enhancements, the process has been improved, again by relieving programmer burden. Previously, business analysts relied on programmers to explain existing functionality, but by using the X-Analysis business rule and data model features, business analysts are now able to directly analyze existing functionality, speeding their work and improving overall productivity.
X-Analysis has modernized IT processes by enabling business-oriented views into the legacy system.
Creating a SQL Database and Data Access Layer from a Legacy System
Innovative Computing Corp. is a leading U.S. based ISV for the trucking industry. With a sophisticated system, and multiple versions under support at any given time, application maintenance is highly complex. Anything that can simplify system maintenance brings big benefits in productivity and quality.
Innovative Computing is using X-Analysis, X-Migrate and X-Modernize to modernize its applications and improve their maintainability. The strategy was to introduce more modularity and independence into the database and the modules that access the database. This was achieved by converting DDS to SQL, and creating separate, callable modules that handle all I/O logic.
The end result is more maintainable, reusable code.
Extracting Design Information to Automate Mass Maintenance
New Penn, like many other owners of legacy systems, periodically finds the need to perform system-wide changes across a large, complex legacy system. In the case of New Penn it was to increase the size of the customer number field. Projects such as these are time-consuming, expensive, tedious and fraught with the risk of oversights or careless mistakes.
By using X-Resize, New Penn was able to drastically cut project costs and at the same time greatly increase visibility into the system and obtain control over the entire process.
By extracting design information from legacy systems projects such as these can be quickly and accurately analyzed. Much of the work can then be automated, leaving developers to primarily confirm results.
The end result: using engineering tools such as X-Analysis and other modules brings modern engineering practices and efficiencies to legacy systems.
More readings about Rethinking Legacy Systems
Extracting intelligence
Read our new Visual Guide to Business Rules Reuse
See our Data Model Extraction product
Sharing Legacy Knowledge in an Organization
Watch a video on How to Document Your System
Read about protecting yourself against knowledge loss
Simplifying Complexity
See our Application Metrics Auditing Tools
Learn Five Secrets of Software Complexity
Reducing Effort
Read about Automated MVC Reengineering
See our Automated Field Expansion Services & Tools
Get the grand tour: Watch a recent webcast on recovering business rules, data models, business processes and complexity metrics.
