Why Valence for System i, AS/400, iSeries RPG Application Modernization? | Valence

Keep your proven System i RPG applications & upgrade them seemlessly for Web 2.0

System i developers today face a myriad of options when looking for the best way to adjust their applications to work effectively in a web browser. Just evaluating all the options (i.e., WebSphere, Java, EGL, JSP, third-party tools, etc.) can take months.

The technology supporting browser interfaces has evolved considerably in recent years. If you’ve paid attention, you’ve noticed the best web sites have moved from relatively static pages to interactive programs that run more like traditional PC applications. The “Web 2.0” user interface on Google Maps is a fantastic case-in-point.

So how can a traditional RPG shop choose the correct path to freshen up its green screen user interfaces to the latest and greatest? How can the shop be assured that its investment will result in a browser interface that doesn’t still look like yesterday’s technology? And most importantly, how can the shop guarantee the speed and efficiency of its green screen applications won’t be lost once the programs are moved into the browser? These are the same dilemmas we faced with modernizing our own green screen applications.

Valence is the result of many iterations of searching for the best way to migrate our green screen RPG program suite (ATOMIC) into the web world. We spent years trying everything from Web Facing/HATS to CGIDEV2/HTML to WebSphere and various third party tools in an attempt to find the “Goldilocks” solution to our quest for a suitable browser interface. Ultimately, as a dedicated RPG shop, we found each solution came up short. To summarize our findings:

Web Facing/HATS

The resulting applications from this approach were, in a word, “clunky.” The user experience left much to be desired. Though some degree of customization was possible, the user interface still had the underpinnings of a green screen application and never really took full advantage of the browser’s capabilities. Ultimately, these screen-scraping tools offered little more than temporary solutions, suitable perhaps for rarely-used applications, but not for our core user programs.

CGIDEV2/HTML

Quite an improvement over Web Facing, but rather labor-intensive on the coding front. And though the user interfaces in HTML were certainly better looking than the 5250 screens we’d been using for years, they still had a sluggish “repaint the whole page” feel that is rapidly becoming passé when compared to modern “Web 2.0” websites.

WebSphere

We tried to force ourselves to go this route for quite a while, actually creating and deploying applications under WebSphere. But the WebSphere option was fraught with complications — from a very difficult server setup to the fact that Java is a tough transition for dedicated RPG programmers to embrace. Ultimately we felt the pain involved just simply wasn’t worthy of the resulting output.

Other 3rd party tools

We tried almost all the web development tools available in the System i community that purportedly target RPG developers. While most of the packages were capable of generating reasonably-performing front-ends to our RPG programs, none were optimized for the Web 2.0 look-and-feel we desired, and all carried a price tag that would’ve been difficult to justify to our green screen users. Additionally, at least one package required use of a proprietary programming language that would only work so long as that package was retained. We were looking for a more industry-standard approach for developing the front end, one that would foster development of a skill-set that could be used on or off the System i.

Beyond the “webification” of our green screen programs themselves, we also needed a robust menuing system to manage these newly browser-enabled applications in a cohesive fashion. In other words, we needed a browser-based replacement for the green screen menu system used to control access to our programs. None of the options we tried (commonly referred to as “portals”) offered this without additional cost and complexity.

Enter Valence…

After exhausting all conventional options, it became clear that to provide the best possible browser interface for our users we would simply have to build the solution ourselves. So in late 2006 we selected a leading provider of front-end web components (ExtJS) and invested a substantial amount of our development resources to create a brand new set of programming tools, a collection that would be ideally suited to an RPG shop like ours. The result of this effort, Valence, provides RPG programmers everything necessary to create robust browser-based applications using the latest in Web 2.0 technology. Beyond reengineering existing green screens, RPG programmers will find the amazing versatility of Valence’s front-end components opens up countless opportunities to create brand new applications, providing functionality that wouldn’t have even been conceivable to program before. Included with Valence is a tab-based portal to manage all these applications on a customizable navigation tree (along with all the requisite security features and controls), so the experience for the end-users is intuitive, elegant and efficient.

A package designed by RPG programmers for RPG programmers