Replete with wizards and widgets, the latest development tool from LANSA can create a collection of Web applications in a matter of minutes.
The need for interoperability and the growing variety of skill sets developers find they need to create Web applications in an IBM i environment have focused attention again on the benefits LANSA can bring to the development environment. The company has complied with the needs of changing times by introducing a new version of Visual LANSA and opening up the LANSA repository to all programs.
LANSA recently announced general availability of V12 of Visual LANSA, a development tool that incorporates LANSA for the Web but includes a number of new wizards and widgets that make creating robust Web applications a task that a developer can do in a morning or less.
For more than 20 years, LANSA has been building its product line toward becoming a platform for development of applications that can be deployed on a variety of platforms and operating systems. It offers numerous rapid application development (RAD) tools for the IBM i environment, and its focus today has been on making IBM i and Microsoft applications interoperable as well as on getting processing back on the IBM i.
Visual LANSA V12 incorporates a number of capabilities, including those found in LANSA for IBM i and LANSA for Web. By broadening the reach of the LANSA metadata repository to cater to any application, LANSA provides IT departments with limited resources a simpler way to maintain their core systems. IT will find their maintenance tasks significantly more productive, the company says.
The LANSA Repository stores system-wide validation rules and business logic in a single location and enforces them with every 5250, Web, Windows, or wireless application. The company has been broadening access to the Repository for several years, and MC Press reviewed LANSA Open for .NET back in 2008. (See "Is Working with the .NET Tribe a Secret to Surviving in Paradise?") At the time, LANSA envisioned opening up the repository to individual platforms one at a time but apparently concluded it made more sense to come out with a release that was available to all applications, which is the focus of its recent announcement. To have common rules and validation change once but apply system-wide can be a huge time savings for IT and ensure greater conformance to standards and security measures for midsize and larger companies. Having a common repository so applications can reuse the business rules regardless of platform or development language can go a long way to eliminate duplication of common business logic across different programs, be they written in RPG, PHP, C#, VB.NET, Java, or COBOL. Or they could be written in LANSA's own language, RDML, the underlying language of all of LANSA's tools. And yes, moving to the LANSA platform generally means learning a new language—RDML—but that could be the end of it, regardless of how many platforms a developer is asked to write for in the future.
MC Press Online interviewed Dave Brault, LANSA product marketing manager, about the recent announcement, and here's what he had to say:
"Obviously, we're living in a very dynamic technological world these days, so your traditional IBM i shop is not what it was 20 years ago, where everything ran on one server, one operating system, one programming language, one database. Those days are long gone.
"So we're trying to continue on with our message of being interoperable and just making the life easier for the developer. In this new paradigm, adapting to a single platform is a lot easier than having to learn five different languages and three different operating systems and four different database management systems; we're always just trying to make life easier for the developer while trying to make the one skill set, one tool set that's interoperable with all the different platforms that are out there."
Brault said opening up the repository to all applications answers a lot of questions that customers have posed to the company over the past few years. Whether the user has JD Edwards or a large homegrown system, he said, "We finally have an answer for that. We allow you to run JD Edwards. If you want to use some of these rules inside of JD Edwards, you can without changing your JD Edwards source code."
Brault said that before the company released LANSA Open for .NET, it saw that there were a large number of IBM i shops that also had .NET developers who wanted to reduce the burden of duplication of code and the risk to data of having different validation rules between the applications. After it released the product, it realized that more than just LANSA and .NET applications needed to work off the same set of rules and logic, so the company went all the way and enhanced the repository so that any application can reuse it.
Inside the repository now is a checkbox that takes all the rules, puts them into a stored procedure, and adds a trigger to the file. Regardless of what the application was developed in, if you try to insert, update, or delete a record in the file, then the rules are going to be enforced by the stored procedure. In cases where you want an exception, you can enforce the rules at the field or file level.
"Yes, there are going to be instances where you don't want to do that, and there is a way that you can code our repository, and you can put a lot of logic around that feature too.… There is one triggering program, and there's a lot of smarts inside of there that can pretty much cater to all your needs."
With version 12, developers now have the option of using SQL to create things like tables instead of using DDS to generate the file.
"This is relevant because IBM has indicated to the user community that the performance of tables using SQL has been improved quite a bit, so what happens when you generate a table using SQL is it actually creates this larger read buffer than when you do it with DDS. So there seems to be quite an improvement in performance.… And to allow our customers to take advantage of this, we made this available in V12 and made it easy to use; it's as simple as checking a box."
Also in V12, it's easier to access other databases from the IBM i, so if you have any 5250 applications or Web applications running on the i, users can get real-time access to data stored on other platforms—such as Windows and Linux—directly from the IBM i programs
"With this release, we just tried to make it not only easier to gather every relevant piece of data for a customer or a product or for whatever, but also to make it easier to make it available for your IBM i applications," says Brault.
He cites the example of a customer that may wish to pull data from Microsoft Dynamics stored inside a SQL Server database running on Windows and merge it with the DB2 data from the IBM i and either display it on a 5250 screen or serve it as a Web application from the i. It's all possible now and easily accomplished, according to LANSA.
Brault says there is support for Unicode in the latest version, important to companies that wish to create applications in multiple languages.
"Unicode support is a feature that really helps international companies that have to support countries using languages other than English, especially double-byte character-set languages, especially if they're going to be running Web applications accessed by anyone from anywhere in the world."
LANSA's framework, called the Visual LANSA Framework, is a business framework that developers use to build business applications without coding the communications plumbing one might have to create each time when using .NET or J2EE. The Visual LANSA framework includes a number of prebuilt methods to perform actions. Many of the features that are commonly found in business applications can be snapped into applications with the Visual LANSA framework.
With V12, there are several new widgets, including a spool-file viewer that just plugs in without coding. Displaying as a tab or object, you can view the spool file in HTML format or rich-client format or take it as a PDF file. Also new is a document management widget that can give an application the basic features of a document management application without coding and without the expense of buying a separate boxed application.
"Our customers love this one," says Brault, "because it allows you to take any type of document– picture, PDF, Excel, or Word document—and attach it to any entity, whether that be a customer [record] or product order and store it in DB2. A company can drag a copy of a scanned check over to an invoice, and those documents will now be linked in the database. It makes backing up easier, too, because you just back up the database, and you have all the information together without having to also back up the IFS."
Other new widgets allow the addition of an on-screen note-taker that saves the information to the database and the ability to take the data that is on the screen and easily place it into an Excel file. These can be added through Visual LANSA without any back-end coding, says Brault.
The new CRUD (create, read, update, delete) for Web allows developers with no HTML knowledge to generate Web applications just by walking through a series of questions. "The way it is architected, we can provide you with as many levels of drill-down capability as the user desires," says Brault. "Literally, it takes you five minutes to run through one of these wizards, so in 20 minutes, you can build four applications and link them up. A half hour later, you have something that is pretty sophisticated and robust in terms of Web-deployed applications."
Moving to the LANSA platform may be a big step for some companies, but LANSA maintains that it is a step in the right direction, given today's trend toward multi-platform environments and interoperability. Yes, there is an up-front expense, but that can be recouped over time in the labor savings of deploying and maintaining applications linked to one rules-based repository. And once a developer has learned the LANSA language, ease of use takes on a whole new meaning.
For further reading about LANSA's application modernization platform, download the free white paper "Revolutionizing System i Application Modernization," which describes features of LANSA Rapid Application Modernization Process (RAMP), from the MC White Paper Center.
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