Application Modernisation

Assessing the eco-system over the last few months, there is an increasing trend for partners to produce “modernisation” solutions.

Both Jumar Solutions and QAT have “modernisation” solutions for CA Gen applications – Jumar Solutions have Project Phoenix, while QAT have Genesis.

This posting is NOT a head-to-head of both offerings, but more a comment on the fact that there is a need in the industry to reuse systems in different ways, whilst keeping the same underlying codebase, albeit refactoring and reshaping where necessary to meet today’s demands.

Some of those demands can be met already by Gen’s inherant multi-platform support, but in general, modernisation applies to applications designed either some years previously (pre-web, pre-components, pre-client/server etc) or even more recently, but without any thought for multi-channel usage.

Modernisation takes the applications and makes changes to the underlying CA-Gen model to produce the same application, which is now ready to be deployed into new styles of environment, such as an SOA, or web-based.

Of course, modernisation doesn’t need to give applications different channels, it could be simply about rearchitecting applications to reduce support and maintenance costs.

Modernisation takes different forms depending on the requirements of the individuals, but the two toolkits mentioned in this article are capable of both (and more).

So – there is help out there for those who realise that manual modernisation of large-scale applications isnt something you’d probably want to take on board without outside assistance !