Newsletter January 2009

While our existing customers are far from describing their business critical Genius Applications as legacy systems, there is always scope for modernization or possibly migration to newer hardware.

We are always ready to meet to discuss development opportunities and in the current economic climate there is a strong case for getting improved productivity from existing systems.

RapidGen Software joins the Mainframe Migration Alliance

RapidGen has recently joined the Mainframe Migration Alliance, a grouping of international IT companies offering software tools and expertise to help organisations migrate mainframe applications to modern, versatile platforms, more particularly the Microsoft platform.

We are well placed to work with customers who wish to modernise mainframe applications and some of our recent consulting work has indicated that there are many situations where our experience with legacy data formats and integrating applications can make a difference at potential roadblocks.

As Scott Rosenbloom, director of the Mainframe Migration Alliance at Microsoft Corp. said in our recent announcement, "RapidGen Software's expertise in database and legacy systems makes them well positioned to help clients migrate to the more flexible Windows platform."

Survival can hinge on staff awareness

Because business continuity is not just about IT, business leaders need to make sure that employees understand the plans, and know what to do in the event of an emergency.

There is worrying evidence that suggests this seldom happens. A survey by BT Global Services in early 2008 found that when disaster strikes, 73 per cent of UK businesses rely more on the initiative of their staff than on detailed business continuity plans to get them back up and running.

More than a third of those questioned said they did not know if their organisation had a business continuity plan, and 41 per cent said that if they did, they personally either did not understand

It or had not taken the time to read it.

"If the building is cordoned off by police and lots of flashing blue lights, the IT might be working, but that makes no difference. You need to sort out who is going to talk to the emergency services, for example, and how to communicate what is going on to both staff, clients and business partners".

Extract from: Protect and survive: How technology helps business continuity.

Computing 09/12/2008

Given that a Standby or DR server needs to be physically independent to protect against hardware failure on the live/production system, a virtual host is an effective solution for consolidating Standby/DR installations. In a network/cluster configuration, fail-over time can be significantly reduced.

For Genius users there is an immediate advantage. A virtual image of the live application will mirror the licence key as well as the configuration of the application. Once the virtual image is loaded the Genius application will assume the identity of the live system and there will be no additional requirement for temporary licence keys as the backup system assumes the node name and network identity of the original that it replaces.

Virtual Standby/DR Solutions

A number of our Windows based users are adopting virtualisation in a drive to limit capital and operating costs and achieve better resource utilisation. In large data centres the adoption of server virtualisation is currently a top priority and one of the most effective ways of "greening" IT.

Often the limited CPU processing loads on individual servers makes consolidation feasible. This not only reduces hardware requirements but allows peripheral equipment such as consoles, keyboards and backup devices to be shared without the need for VNC or complex KVM equipment. This has implications for Standby and DR solutions.

File name specifications (filespecs) can also use logical names or environment variables to allow dynamic access to any file to be controlled outside the Genius runtime environment.

In addition names can use the concept of main and default specifications. Default specifications appear in braces ( { } ) and may appear both before and after the main specification:

{<leading default>}<main filespec>{<trailing default>}

Note: The braces {} are part of the syntax and enclose the leading and trailing defaults.

These defaults are applied as follows: 1) Create a default filespec from the leading defaults 2) Apply the trailing defaults to supersede any of the defaults just set up 3) Supersede any of the defaults just set up with any of the parts of the main filespec that exist.

Qualifiers appearing in any of the parts of the filespecs are used as "switches", so that the appearance of a qualifier in <leading default> means that the qualifier is kept even if it does not appear in either <main filespec> or <trailing default>.

The following example shows how a filespec and its qualifiers are built up:

{USER$DISK:.SAT}CUSTOMER.DAT/RECFM=V{/TEXT}

An initial default file spec is set up from the leading default.

USER$DISK:.SAT

The trailing default is then used to alter this:

USER$DISK:.SAT/TEXT

Finally the main filespec is used to alter this once more:

USER$DISK:CUSTOMER.DAT/TEXT/RECFM=V

This powerful technique is also supported when concatenated filespecs (+) are used and can greatly reduced the size and complexity of the strings required to identify a group of files.

This example...

{USERDATA:.DAT}CURRENT+TEMP{.OLD}+OLDEST

will expand and equate to:

USERDATA:CURRENT.DAT+USERDATA:TEMP.OLD+USERDATA:OLDEST.DAT

Some of the standard courses we offer:

Introduction to the Genius Solution software lasting about 5 days.
Introduction to report writing and other user tools with easyGenius from 1 to 3 days.
ExpertGenius course applying General Decision Table theory to the programming language of the Genius solution and teaching of syntax, nomenclature and structure of this structured programming language - lasts 3 days.

We can tailor our courses for your needs and of course we can offer consultancy in conjunction with training.

Training

Do you need to brush up on your skills and knowledge? Do you have new staff that require training?

Do you want further skills in writing reports or design applications? Do you need assistance in building a complete system?

We offer training and teaching in all our Genius products and related areas:

From a half day on a specific topic to a week or more building a sample system.
An applied approach to Decision Table Theory or conversion courses from other Decision Table based languages to Genius' own expertGenius.

to file systems.

The dynamic reporting system was also modified to generate RPL code and run the Genius compiler and runtime system. The chosen "database" was in fact a collection of MicroFocus ISAM indexed files and the new programs use a generalised "G" file interface to access the payroll data and store their report output in a centralised repository.

We delivered the application well before the agreed completion date and to budget.

The new system has now successfully gone live and is handling over 100

The Solution Providers

Earlier this year RapidGen Software successfully delivered a migration solution to a major UK software bureau.

A large payroll system was to be ported from an IBM mainframe to a MS Windows server environment and part of the reporting system involved a large library of TAB360 Filetab reports as well as a dynamic report generator.

The syntax of ExpertGenius/RPL retains a significant level of support for the legacy TAB360 programs, so, rather than manually edit all 400+ source files, we decided to provide our customer with a conversion tool which will take any Filetab program and produce a functionally equivalent RPL program from it.

In practice less than 5% of code lines need changes and these mainly relate