At the heart of the technical debt of IT assets lie technological choices which have become less relevant over time.
Client-server languages, which were all the rage in the 90s and are now completely obsolete, are a perfect example.
Easel, Visual Basic, ASP, Delphi, NSDK, Powerbuilder, Oracle Forms, Windev, etc. are platforms that are technically completely outdated, but that often continue to meet business needs.
Redeveloping these applications represents a significant cost for poor business added value.
As a result, these projects are frequently arbitrated, and the debt grows, posing a number of problems:
- Lack of skills available on the market,
- Difficulties in implementing upgrades
- Lack of interoperability
- Incompatibilities with new versions of OS and databases
- Security vulnerabilities
- End of support
- Etc.
Fully automatic migration of these technologies is possible, but the quality and maintainability of the code produced is low due to the interweaving of presentation and processing layers in the source code.
In order to optimize the quality of the target code, we have chosen a semi-automatic approach involving the customization of a specialized Eclipse or VSCode framework and the development of dedicated plugins.
This workstation enables :
- Browsing the source code,
- Viewing screens in graphical mode for a better understanding of the existing code,
- Converting screens to the target Framework and manual finalization with the Source / Target multi-window
- Converting the Source code to Java/C# with tags added to the code portions to be finalized
- Manual finalization of the java/C# code with the Source / Target “side-by-side”
- Testing on the basis of captured test sets
This approach achieves a very high quality of target code while optimizing the transformation load. A fully automatic approach would have led to code that was too dependent on the source code.
The degree of automation generally reduces the workload by 50-80%, or even more in some cases.
Use cases
Background The SNCF’s purchasing department managed its operations on an MVS, COBOL, DB2 platform with an outdated client-server Easel front. The
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The Project was based on the development of a suite of tools dedicated to migrate the SiPo application from a
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Background Arcelor Mittal was using the SPITAB table manager on its mainframe platform with high licensing and maintenance costs and wanted
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