System iNetwork

October 1, 2008

RPG and .NET: Can We All Get Along?

Imagine that you're a manufacturer with all your data and applications sitting on an IBM i. You have a problem because your shop floor equipment runs .NET applications that can't interact with your i in realtime as your products roll down the assembly line. Not to worry! LANSA can help your two platforms get along. The company has created a solution that lets your .NET and IBM i applications seamlessly transact in realtime and synchronize disparate processes such as the ERP and industrial procedures in this example. As your manufactured goods sequentially step through production, information is pushed back and forth between the i and the .NET shop floor applications. LANSA gives you the ability to call RPG/Cobol programs from .NET and transact with the database in a quicker, more highly integrated way. As a bonus, .NET developers don’t have to know anything about the i, DB2, or LANSA to make it happen.

The formula is LANSA Open for .NET, a class library that combines the strengths of the .NET and IBM i environments without compromising data integrity. It harbors enterprise rules in a one meta repository, which is made available to developers through a completely independent data services layer that governs all database access. As a result, you can subject both platforms to the same validation constraints without duplicating source code, and you can also enjoy tighter security, faster performance, and cleaner, more reliable data. Ahh…RPG and .NET can indeed get along.

Strategic Middleware

David Brault, LANSA product marketing manager, sees LANSA Open for .NET as strategic middleware. "The LANSA Open for .NET class library contains a bunch of APIs that developers can embed into their applications for things such as native access to DB2, the ability to call legacy programs, and the ability to share business rules with their 5250 applications, all without having to write the code themselves. This means cleaner, more reliable data back on the i when DB2 data is updated by .NET programs. Now that companies want their .NET applications to do more than just read DB2 data, a proper data service must be part of their architecture," Brault says. "The product is not targeted to people who just want to read DB2 data from .NET. It's intended for people who want to go to the next level--straight through processing (STP) on the IBM i from their .NET apps."

.NET helps clients create nice-looking rich client interfaces, Brault explains, but the customers can still use the power of DB2 on the i for data processing. "In terms of development, there's the .NET camp and the RPG camp--rival tribes that tend not to get along well together. There's a clash between these two camps, and there's not a lot of synergy. We can finally get these mixed-mode development shops together on the same page by giving them the benefit of reuse."

Sharing Resources

Why did the company develop LANSA Open for .NET? "What we are finding is that most of our customers have a blend of RPG, .NET, and LANSA applications, and they need a better way to share resources," Brault says. "Let's say I'm an IT manager handling these siloed development camps. I can't share common rules, and I have security issues when using ODBC. I don't want to write information directly to DB2 files from .NET in an unchecked manner or suddenly my data integrity becomes suspect. Data integrity is a big issue. In the old days we had one set of RPG/Cobol source code, one database, and one interface device. Now we want to do transactions from other interfaces without putting bad data into our database. Because of this fact, some companies don't even try to integrate. They take .NET data and print out a report to re-key into the green screen applications to enforce the business rules. They can't guarantee, though, that what they typed in and what they re-keyed will be the same. Again, they could compromise their data integrity."

With the new product, clients can go to one location to make system-wide changes without recompiling or redeploying their applications. The repository automatically kicks in and tells the end users what they've done incorrectly. "Now the developers can code less and let the repository tell the end users exactly what they did wrong. They can specify the language for the error messages for companies with multilingual requirements."

.NET developers write their applications in C#, VB.NET, and so on. They enroll the LANSA Open for .NET class library into their environment, and it automatically provides a secure, encrypted TCP/IP connection to the i. The LANSA repository stores all the business rules in one spot but enforces them throughout the .NET applications.

Togetherness

Suppose you're a leading supplier and services provider to national companies. You buy a .NET application that front ends the i. LANSA Open for .NET is a solution that can help you maintain enterprise data integrity on the i, manage silo development teams and projects, extend the reach of your enterprise data to .NET, provide .NET applications with native access level to DB2, and enforce system-wide business rules.

LANSA Open for .NET, Brault concludes, provides "a single point of truth" to reuse all your validation rules and business logic among all your development camps to help them share resources and get along together.

Posted by vhamende at October 1, 2008 2:57 PM

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