News

Modernizing Legacy Mainframe Apps Saves Dev Time, Money

• By Shawna McAlearney
• August 21, 2006

By modernizing instead of replacing legacy mainframe apps, Tulsa County in Oklahoma improved access to county property records and legal documents and saved an estimated $300,000. However, cost-savings was only one element: Using Software AG’s ApplinX improved customer relations and cut development time.

“It has greatly enhanced the experience of the public in dealing with obtaining information from our local government without requiring an expensive and total rewrite of existing mainframe applications,” says Tom Trimble, MIS director of Tulsa County. “ApplinX was very intuitive and permitted our small staff to provide a fast and usable solution to meet the evolving needs of the taxpayers without the timeline and cost of typical new application development.”

Tulsa County built a front-end interface between its mainframe land records and document imaging/open systems data to create what Trimble calls, “a user-friendly Web application that streamlines multiple applications in multiple environments into a workflow that is very easy to use.”

“In less than six weeks,” adds Trimble, “we had a fully developed solution ready for production that combined mainframe and open system data from multiple applications and placed them on the Internet through screens that appear to be one Web-based system.”

Software AG Monday released version 5.1 of its ApplinX legacy modernization tool, which the company says will transform green-screen, terminal applications on mainframe and iSeries platforms into Web-accessible modern interfaces with no additional coding.

ApplinX allows users combine multiple screens into a single Web page, and automatically generates Web components and Web services based upon XML, SOAP and WSDL standards. These components and services are compatible with Java and .NET environments, and can be readily incorporated into a service-oriented architecture, the company says. 

Other new capabilities supported by ApplinX version 5.1 include the ability to publish a Web service in any UDDI registry, and the capability to bring an externally created Web service into new applications based on the "flow" of procedures that ApplinX creates by combining multiple terminal screens.

 "Knowing that legacy modernization is never a scenario where one-size-fits- all,” says Joe Gentry, vice president of business line enterprise transaction systems, Software AG, “ApplinX provides the flexibility for application workflow optimization, Web enablement and service enablement.”

ApplinX 5.1 is available now, and is priced with a scalable usage model.