Migrations

 

 

4GL Migration Service

 

Eases the Evolution of Application Technology in a Changing World

Today as never before, IT departments are in an environment where rapidly changing business requirements and constantly evolving technologies are the daily norm. The TSG 4GL migration service is one of the most cost-effective means of enabling evolutionary change from one programming environment to another.

Systems developed using proprietary mainframe fourth generation languages - 4GLs - can be a drain on IT departments’ resources. Now, the TSG 4GL migration service reverse engineers legacy applications written in the major 4GL languages and extracts the design information in the form of screen design, data accesses and program logic flow

Highlights

• Makes huge savings in just a single year by removing the 4GL run-time licence fees and associated support and upgrade costs
• Frees your environment from dependence on a particular vendor
• Improves CPU usage, leading to lower overheads
• Generates well structured and hence easy to maintain programs
• Processes a number of 4GLs
• Technical Information

The TSG 4GL migration service reads in the 4GL source and generates a functionally equivalent application in well-structured COBOL (CICS) with the appropriate database calls. This provides an identical application to the users and improves CPU usage because of the efficiency of COBOL code.

As COBOL is the most open, portable and widely used programming language in existence, these ‘new’ applications can, in turn, be easily ported to a number of different environments. Because the programs generated are well structured and consistent, maintenance work becomes a straightforward task. Furthermore, with the run-time free COBOL generated CPU upgrades will not incur additional upgrade charges. Thus, the organisation is left with lower overheads and ‘portability’ whenever it is needed.

Re-engineering vs New Development

If you have core business applications that have served your organisation well for many years, using the automated re-engineering option will provide the most cost-effective and speedy route to escaping from a proprietary environment.

Supported 4GLs

TSG recommends an initial feasibility study to provide you with detailed cost justification and risk assessment. We can currently process the following 4GLs:

• CSP (IBM)
• MANTIS (Cincom)
• IDEAL (CA)
• Others are currently being planned.

Moving away from old 4GL legacy systems will save you annual maintenance charges, upgrade charges and future training costs. In addition, migrating your systems to COBOL will reduce CPU requirements and place you in an ideal position should you wish to migrate the current applications to another platform.

Firstly, the screen layout, program logic and data access information for the entire application is read in and processed by the migration engine. It then creates a functionally equivalent application in good quality COBOL, BMS and data access calls.

Since standards and styles of 4GL programming can differ vastly from site to site this may be an iterative process with minor adjustment being made to the engine's parameters between runs.

Due to the total re-engineering concept used, a different database target may be chosen for the re-engineered program. For example, the original program may be Mantis with VSAM and DL/I, but the ‘new’ program could be a properly architected COBOL SQL application.

MicroFocus Cobol

If required, it is also possible to generate MicroFocus PC based Cobol, or alternatively, the generated mainframe Cobol can be maintained and/or run in the MicroFocus MainFrame Express environment without amendment.

 

 

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