New technologies can offer organizations the opportunity to improve productivity and/or reap the reward of new revenue streams. Nonetheless, their introduction can be expensive and disruptive. One major contributing factor to this cost and disruption is the need to hire new employees or train existing staff to acquire the required skills. Organizations with existing iSeries development skills can avoid some of these costs when building new Web-enabled, .NET-based systems by using ASNA Visual RPG (AVR) for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to give their developers the ability to develop .NET-compliant programs using RPG syntax.
AVR provides a Windows-based RPG compiler that generates code that is 100% compliant with Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), the language underlying all applications running under the .NET framework. The assemblies generated by AVR run under the .NET platform using either traditional fat Windows clients or browser-based user interfaces.
Using ASNA's DataGate for iSeries 400 communication middleware software, AVR applications connect effectively to IBM's iSeries and AS/400 servers (from OS/400 V4R2 and up). These applications can perform read/write record-level access to DB2 Universal Database for physical and logical files. They can also take advantage of OS/400 and i5/OS host program objects through a CALL/PARM interface with which RPG programmers are very familiar.
In addition to DB2 Universal Database, applications developed with AVR can also connect to Microsoft's SQL Server or ASNA's own Acceler8DB database, without changes to any of these databases and without change to the application.
Visual Studio .NET Integration
AVR integrates transparently into Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, adding RPG language capabilities to it without eliminating the other common .NET languages such as C# or Visual Basic. Consequently, Visual Studio can be used as a common development environment for all programmers creating applications for the Internet, irrespective of the language that they use. Since all programs must be compiled into MSIL in order to run on the .NET framework, the result is the same regardless of whether the high-level language used is RPG or any of the standard Visual Studio .NET languages. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: Programmers can use Visual Studio as a common development environment, regardless of which of many languages they prefer to use.
The RPG used in AVR is not completely identical to iSeries RPG, but the differences are small enough that iSeries RPG programmers will adapt to the new environment quite easily and with minimal training. The differences in the RPG version come about because of the need to enable facilities such as Web Services, inheritance and polymorphism, and event-driven programming, as well as to support .NET's complete set of name spaces.
Because it operates within Visual Studio, AVR works seamlessly with any third-party applications (such as source/versioning control) that are capable of integrating into Visual Studio. AVR also takes advantage of the powerful facilities inherent in Visual Studio 2003, including its debugger and source code editor. Using AVR, the Intellisense collapsible code and color coding features of the Visual Studio editor are tuned for RPG, thereby enhancing productivity for RPG programmers. In particular, Intellisense provides help completing syntax. As a developer keys in code, Intellisense displays a pop-up box containing all RPG elements that begin with the characters typed so far. This can be particularly helpful for iSeries programmers who do not yet have extensive experience with the.NET-related RPG elements supported by AVR.
Benefits
AVR for .NET offers a number of business benefits, including the following:
- Because AVR for .NET employs a superset of the RPG programming language, RPG developers can learn AVR for .NET easily and, thus, quickly use it to produce .NET applications, thereby reducing training time and cost. At the same time, developers can pick up new .NET skills, thereby advancing their careers and enhancing the value that they provide to their employers.
- AVR for .NET allows existing OS/400 and i5/OS program objects to be called from Windows- or browser-based applications, thereby protecting the investment organizations have made in their applications. Employing new code developed using AVR for .NET, legacy program objects can serve as back-ends for new Web Services.
- Because AVR for .NET integrates into Visual Studio alongside other languages common to the Web, it provides a common development environment, supporting the latest Web-based technologies, for all of an organization's programming teams, without forcing RPG programmers to abandon their skills. It thus builds a bridge between Visual Basic, C#, Visual J#, and RPG programming teams.
- AVR for .NET supports Web Services standards such as XML, XSL, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. Adhering to these widely accepted industry standards, rather than adopting proprietary protocols, reduces the chance of the resulting applications abruptly becoming obsolete, as can happen should the owner of a proprietary protocol go out of business.
As a result of these benefits, AVR has gained considerable acceptance in the market and is already used by more than 10,000 developers.
About ASNA
Established in 1982, ASNA is a privately held company with a head office in San Antonio, Texas, and European headquarters in Guildford, England. More than 30 distributors and numerous business partners sell and service ASNA offerings around the world. ASNA is a Microsoft Certified Partner and a member of IBM's PartnerWorld for Developers program.
Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, a writer, and president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based marketing communications firm. Joel has 25 years experience working in IT, first as a programmer/analyst and then as a marketer. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto. Contact Joel at
ASNA Inc.
9901 West IH-10, Suite 1000
San Antonio, Texas 78230
USA
Web: www.asna.com
Email:
Tel: 800.289.ASNA (2762) or 210.408.0212
Fax: 210.408.0211
Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, writer, and formerly president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto-based marketing communications firm. He has 30 years' experience in various IT capacities and now specializes in writing articles, white papers, and case studies for IT vendors and publications across North America. Joel is also the author of BYTE-ing Satire, a compilation of a year's worth of his columns. He holds a BS in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto.
MC Press books written by Joel Klebanoff available now on the MC Press Bookstore.
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