Businesses can modernize their RPG software environments without disrupting mission-critical applications and while making use of existing programming skills. They can achieve significant business benefits. For example, building software on the workstation can greatly increase developer productivity and enhance speed to market. Using current RPG programming skills to build powerful workstation applications saves training time. Corporate assets can achieve new life when Java applications are created to connect existing corporate applications and data, such as in IBM DB2/400 databases, to the Internet.
Tenfold improvement in developer productivity
One company that has benefited greatly from modernization is Genesis Expert Systems, Inc. of Lawrenceville, Georgia. This software consulting and development firm super-charged the productivity of its programmers and end users by using IBM VisualAge RPG to build its AS/400 supply chain management application for distribution and management companies.
Genesis' application, called XO/Commerce, brings together client/server and expert systems in a whole new way. XO/Commerce features reusable VisualAge RPG templates, which do most of the work for the programmer analyst. Genesis estimates about 50 percent of the objects created for XO/Commerce are reusable. Todd Cung, vice president of System Development at Genesis, explains, "As a result we estimate we've achieved as much as a tenfold improvement in developer productivity in some areas." In one case, a change that took 40 hours to code in a green-screen environment was completed in 4 hours using XO/Commerce. The programmers at Genesis were already familiar with RPG, so their learning curve was minimal.
Fifty percent increase in user productivity
Cung estimates the productivity improvement for users to be as much as 50 percent compared to working in a green-screen environment. All activities in the supply chain management process are on the Windows PC desktop, just a mouse click away. Business areas including purchasing, customer service, various warehouse managers, and accounting can all access real-time, online information pertinent to them with a level of speed and performance that helps increase their efficiency. For example, customer service can process orders quickly and answer virtually all customer questions on the spot, without callbacks.
In the future, Genesis plans to turn XO/Commerce into a Web-based application using Java. The latest version of VisualAge RPG, enables developers to create Java applications and applets because it converts RPG source to Java source. Developers can also integrate ActiveX parts into their applications, giving them the flexibility to use existing parts available from various vendors.
During the past three years, Kampgrounds of America, Inc. (KOA) has implemented three mission-critical software packages using VisualAge RPG on Windows 95 clients. Excited by the new Java byte code feature in VisualAge RPG, which it is beta testing, KOA plans to write Web applications by using its existing RPG programming skills. Jef Sutherland, director in Information Services for KOA, states, "We feel that IBM is now committed to the VisualAge RPG product. We also believe IBM realizes that VisualAge RPG offers a solution for traditional applications and Web development for RPG programmers today, even though AS/400 shops may opt to move over time to a Java environment."
With added support for Java interoperability, VisualAge RPG, part of the AS/400 Programming Languages and Application Development Tools Version 4 Release 4, helps strengthen the AS/400 as a key server in a network environment. The new VisualAge RPG enables businesses to modernize and Web-enable their software environment with speed and stability, while reusing programmer skills and adding vitality to corporate assets.
