IBM Business Partner Wipro modernizes a financial services system using EGL

Challenge

A leading financial services company in North America needed Wipro to rewrite its 4GL mission- critical application with an enhanced browser-based UI and separate presentation, business and data layers to enable the reuse of components in an SOA.

Solution
Wipro and its customer chose IBM Rational Business Developer and EGL technology to modernize the application. The new system accesses the customer’s existing IBM DB2 information management system running on an IBM System i platform, and now includes IBM WebSphere Application Server software to support a modern, three-tier architecture.

Key Benefits
Wipro increased the efficiency of its development process and shortened its service time to market; it also increased developer productivity by 15 percent over traditional Java EE development. Wipro’s customer has a new Web-based financial system that leverages its existing IBM DB2 database while providing the flexibility to reuse functionality in an SOA.

One of Wipro’s largest customers in the financial services sector had been depending on a green screen legacy application written years ago in a fourth-generation programming language (4GL). When the 4GL vendor declared that the language would no longer be supported on IBM System i® technology, the customer faced potentially serious production problems and was at risk of substantial revenue loss.

To mitigate these risks, the financial services company approached Wipro to redevelop the application. Exceptionally complex, the business-critical application had more than 1,000 screens. In addition to replacing the green screen user interface (UI) with a browser-based UI, Wipro was to add new features for processing financial transactions and to separate the presentation logic from the data and business logic. Wipro’s customer wanted to keep the legacy system’s existing back end, an IBM DB2® information management data server running on a System i platform. And to take advantage of reusable services and modern design principles, the customer wanted the application to be developed in alignment with its service oriented architecture (SOA) vision.

Considering the criticality of the system, Wipro wanted to deliver a solution quickly; it also wanted to provide a development platform that its variously skilled developers (and its customer’s variously skilled developers) could quickly learn and become productive in to develop Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications. This approach was taken to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for Wipro’s customer: The increased productivity would lower the cost of development, while an easy-to-learn platform would enable the customer’s legacy developers to maintain the system after it was delivered.

Choosing EGL and a proof-of-concept project
After evaluating several alternatives, Wipro and its customer decided to implement a proof-of-concept (POC) application using Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) and IBM Rational® Business Developer software. Working closely with IBM consultants, a team comprising developers from Wipro and its customer successfully completed the POC in one month. IBM consultants helped in identifying requirements and provided training, mentoring and troubleshooting services.

The developers learned how to use EGL and Rational Business Developer to build a simple but sophisticated Web application. The POC application was deployed on IBM WebSphere® Application Server software, which accessed data from the DB2 data server running on the System i platform. Presentation and business logic were separated using the model-view-controller pattern, and application artifacts were modularized through the use of libraries and services.

The EGL-based POC successfully demonstrated the comprehensive functionality of the chosen business process and its support for SOA. It also showed the customer how the new browser-based screens would look. Based on the success of this pilot project, the customer chose Rational Business Developer and EGL technology as its strategic platform for development moving forward.

Redeveloping the application
As the documentation for the legacy application was sparse and outdated, Wipro began the effort by applying its internal code-harvesting techniques to extract and document the business rules from the existing application (also know as retro-documentation). Based on this as-is understanding of the system, Wipro and IBM jointly developed a target reference architecture using Rational Business Developer. Reusable business services were identified using top-down and bottom-up approaches, and then wireframes for the graphical user interface (GUI) screens were developed. After building the reference architecture, the team created a detailed application architecture and then began designing components. The development team implemented the business logic using EGL and developed the new UI screens using JavaServer Faces (JSF) components in Rational Business Developer. The team realized a significant time reduction in UI development with Rational Business Developer as compared to a traditional approach.

At its peak, the team included 4 project managers, 8 business analysts, 6 EGL architects, 60 EGL developers and 10 EGL testers. The redevelopment of the entire legacy system in EGL using Rational Business Developer was planned to be completed in 18 months. To support the customer’s SOA strategy, the Wipro team developed reusable functional and technical components and implemented 20 reusable business functions.


Focusing on core functionality
EGL enabled Wipro developers to concentrate on the business logic of the appli­cation, instead of spending time mired in the underlying technical infrastructure and code. The developers then automatically generated Java code to be deployed on WebSphere Application Server. This enabled the developers to spend more time on productive work, including addressing compliance with the myriad regulatory rules that govern financial applications. “In traditional development, developers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to invoke components across layers, but with EGL we can focus on the system logic and regulatory requirements, auto­matically generate simple create-read-update-delete operations and worry less about how to invoke components and other run-time details. Also, because the technical complexities are hidden, it is easier for developers trained in other pro­cedural languages to learn and use EGL,” says Jaydip Sanyal, the group head of legacy modernization at Wipro.

Building on initial success
Wipro was more productive with EGL, which led to time and cost savings. Moreover, EGL promoted the development of reusable services, which will increase IT savings in the future. Because EGL is easy to learn and similar to procedural languages, it is possible for Wipro to leverage existing development resources on enterprise modernization efforts.

The benefits to Wipro’s client are equally impressive. The customer has a new Web-based financial system that leverages the reliability of its existing IBM DB2 database. The green screens have been replaced with a browser-based UI that helps increase user productivity and improves usability. The development of reusable business services and the separation of presentation, business and data layers have posi­tioned the company well to pursue its SOA strategy.

EGL has also provided Wipro with a flexible foundation that it can use to meet a wide range of customer requests and technical requirements. Krishnakumar N. Menon, general manager of business process management and SOA practices at Wipro, concludes, “IBM Rational Business Developer enabled us to Web-enable mission-critical client assets previously difficult to leverage, and achieve 15 percent productivity over traditional approaches. We can also optimize project staffing as our consultants’ skills are transferable for future projects, providing us with new flexibility in our services delivery.

For more information

To learn more about IBM Rational Business Developer software featuring EGL, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:

ibm.com/software/awdtools/developer/businessIBM