In-Depth
Reliable legacy-extended apps a reality
Atlanta-based Jacada Ltd. has been providing legacy extension and integration
solutions since 1990. Companies wanting to expose internal business processes
to external constituents can do so with Jacada's offerings at low cost and with
low risk. Large enterprise organizations use Jacada technology to modernize
existing legacy apps to reengineer legacy application workflow, generate a more
efficient GUI to replace green screens and to Web-enable these core business
systems.
As these applications become a critical piece of business, their reliability
becomes increasingly important. "Most may start small-scale, [but then]
they're successful beyond their wildest dreams; then reliability and performance
come under fire," noted Dale Vecchio, research director in Gartner Inc.'s
St. Louis office.
"Because [a legacy application] is Web-enabled, the whole world gets at
it and then it becomes a problem in terms of testing," added Stephen Burkholder,
CEO at consulting company Work Smarter Systems, Regina, Saskatchewan.
Legacy extension applications, Gartner's Vecchio said, need to be more reliable
than traditional legacy systems, not less. Why? "Because they're exposed
to external constituents," he said. Mercury Interactive Corp., Sunnyvale,
Calif., recognized this and entered into an agreement with Jacada in November
2001 to create a customized version of its LoadRunner load-testing tool specifically
for Jacada.
LoadRunner for Jacada, which supports load testing of the Jacada Server for
Java, HTML and XML clients, verifies scalability requirements. "Jacada
is getting to high-end environments where it's not just simply about exposing
new information to constituents, it's about reliability. That's where LoadRunner
becomes important," Vecchio said.
Prior to this version of LoadRunner, customers relied on third-party load-testing
tools to test Jacada applications. "The amount of code involved in using
these third-party tools would impact the customer's ability to complete the
load testing of their applications in a rapid manner," explained Laura
Schwartz, Jacada's senior director of business development. With LoadRunner
for Jacada, however, "our customers can easily test their entire infrastructure
without writing custom code."
See the related article "Making
sure legacy-Web links are in sync."
About the Author
Lana Gates is a freelance writer based in Mesa, Arizona. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].