The knowledge and information contained in an organization's business software is vitally important and very valuable, but often this information covering the operation, metrics, and design of the software is tantalizingly out of reach. Without this knowledge, maintenance and changes to the system are not as efficient or effective as they could be. Accurate and current information about an entire system can greatly improve the productivity of your IT staff and reduce maintenance costs by eliminating the need to research, catalog, and assemble the information manually for each service request or modernization project.

Databorough's X-Analysis application documentation, business-rule extraction, and modernization suite provides a wealth of useful features for System i application modernization, impact analysis, basic source code comprehension, and system re-engineering. With its powerful capabilities for dissecting RPG and Cobol programs and documenting how they work, X-Analysis has built a reputation for being the most powerful tools in its class.

X-Analysis lets users document and diagram application-program interconnections. It can analyze entire application systems, raising the level of abstraction to make it understandable to users other than developers, and takes into consideration an application's systemwide context. It can automatically isolate and narrate business rules and logic within applications; recognize custom-built constructs within packaged applications; provide structure diagrams; compile lists of call stacks; analyze the scope of proposed changes; and generate comment-like explanations of functions, inputs, outputs, and object interrelationships, including deriving foreign key relationships between files.

Instead of just documenting how legacy OS/400, i5/OS, and i OS applications work, X-Analysis 8 now lets companies modernize RPG/Cobol System i applications and incorporate new concepts and methods for design extraction and refactoring monolithic RPG applications into modern application architecture.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Not only is "reduce, reuse, recycle" a good environmental strategy, but it also makes sense for IT. Recycling old code includes code reuse as well as creating new application functions or interfaces by employing code restructuring. By reducing the amount of unnecessary code that's written, especially through well-established code reuse techniques, you can lower the cost of application maintenance. In many cases, companies can reuse existing code and implement new application functions and interfaces incrementally.

With X-Analysis 8, Databorough has taken the ideas of re-engineering and applied it to the code designs extracted by the X-Analysis tools to create a technology that refactors legacy code, thereby producing cleaner, efficient, non-proprietary re-engineered code in new languages such as J2EE or EGL. Customers can now assemble new, re-engineered applications out of the legacy applications they have broken down using X-Analysis's traditional strengths. X-Analysis uses its own analysis repository, plus pattern-searching algorithms, to derive relational data models; extract business rules; and build Unified Modeling Language (UML) activity/use case diagrams, logical screen flows, and metadata. The structured, repository-based format of these extracted designs makes it possible to programmatically reuse them for rebuilding the core of a new application. This can be done with new purpose-built tools in X-Analysis 8 that automatically rebuild the database, business logic, I/O, and user interface layers.

In addition to transforming a DDS-based database into a new SQL-based database, X-Analysis is able to extract business rules from RPG or Cobol applications, then embed them into third-party business-rule engines; generate UML activity, use case, and class diagrams; and even generate service-oriented architecture (SOA) or web application classes from these rules. Extracted user interface metadata is converted into JSF/JavaBeans (or EGL equivalents), which can then be used in new development tools such as IBM Rational or Genuitec's MyEclipse Blue.

Whether your needs are as routine as application maintenance, as urgent as application modernization, or as all-encompassing as re-engineering an entire application system, Databorough's X-Analysis can provide automation and simplification to carry out such projects.

Stuart Milligan is chief operating officer for Databorough.

Vendor Contact Information
Databorough
800-605-5023
Databorough.com [2]
X-Analysis