When local government officials in Sioux City, Iowa, needed a way to provide attorneys with round-the-clock access to garnishment case files, they turned to ASNA's Visual RPG 8.0 for Visual Studio 2005 to create a website that integrated their System i with the .NET framework. The result is 24 happy Woodbury County law offices that now have a 24-7 connection and several relieved sheriff's office clerks who no longer have to field hundreds of information requests each month.

Prior to partnering with ASNA [1], city officials exported System i data to the web by downloading files to an SQL server that exposed the information on Intel-based websites. Instead, the Sioux City folks needed interactive, realtime i database access.

John Brandt, senior system analyst for the Woodbury County Information and Communication Commission, says officials selected ASNA's Visual RPG (AVR) because they are "more comfortable with AVR than C# or Visual Basic .NET and like the way ASNA easily provides access to System i databases." They also appreciate being able to use RPG and Visual Studio 2005.

In a short time Brandt says the IT center installed the products, viewed training examples available online, and designed web pages. "It only took a matter of days to create the solution, and it has been very reliable since it was deployed," he reports. It now takes less than an hour a month to manage the new system. Logins number more than 420 a month.

AVR = Modernization

AVR is a modern implementation of RPG that lets RPG developers easily build web and Windows applications. It provides direct, secure, and speedy access to both files and program objects on IBM's System i server and Microsoft's SQL Server. Using a familiar but modernized syntax, RPG programmers can quickly apply their long-standing RPG experience to create modern applications that connect seamlessly to the i platform.

With AVR, RPG programmers can modernize existing RPG applications, develop web services, and extend System i applications to .NET while continuing to program with a familiar, RPG-like syntax. AVR integrates into Microsoft's Visual Studio and compiles to 100-percent-verifiable Microsoft Intermediate Language.

AVR = Round-the-Clock Results

With ASNA's solution, "Attorneys can get instant access to case information 24-7 and don't have to rely on calling a clerk on the phone," Brandt notes. "The attorneys really like to be able to check their cases any time they want, and several use the site at night and on weekends." In addition to saving phone time, Brandt cites quick benefit time, scalability, and ease of integration as advantages of the AVR product. The city plans to add another search screen as well as the ability to export directly into Microsoft Excel.

"Since getting our feet wet with this project, we have created websites for viewing and maintaining mug shots, employee payroll information, police officer scheduling, climbing-wall reservations, and animal control," Brandt reports. "We have also written several applications with AVR, most recently to create import files for our water-billing hand-held devices and to process the files exported by the devices to our billing system."