In-Depth

Reliable legacy-extended apps a reality

• By Lana Gates
• May 1, 2002

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."