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Global system:
The technology supplied by Eranea is mainly separated in 2 parts:
The core technology delivers the intrinsic added-value of Eranea and the systems components make this delivery fully industrial at high scales
- the core technology of transcoding itself: it is composed of the transcoder itself and the runtime framework
- the systems components making use of the core technology to make it a transparent, scalable, repeatable process over the course of the project. The resulting “transcoding factory” allows the application to be transcoded and re-transcoded every day in a very efficient way for system engineers, architects and developers. They can get reports on all details for each transcoding run as well as access all the collected information (cross-references, usage statistics, patterns, etc…) on source code. This fluidity and transparency of our transcoding process in one of the key success factors of our solution when deployed by our customers.
Core technology:
Transcoding Cobol (or another language) is in essence very similar to traditional compiling techniques:
- the transcoder translates the original source code (Cobol) to another language (Java) that is going to be executed. That’s the role and function of NeaTranscoder which takes Cobol programs potentially including CICS and SQL directives, Cobol copy clauses, JCL jobs cards, BMS screen maps description and turns them to their Java equivalent. Additionally, while transcoding, NeaTranscoder produces very detailed reports (cross-references, usage patterns, potential improvements, etc.)
- the newly generated application needs then some framework to supply it with the functions to emulate the original transactional monitor, user-interface interactions, batch execution environment, etc.. That’s the role of NeaRuntime. Original character-oriented screens are turned to dynamic and rich (Ajax) intranet interface through their rendering via Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which puts the application on a par with the best internet sites which are the reference point for end users now used to visit them regularly for personal or professional matters.
- the generated Java gets then compiled to regular JVM bytecode by the standard compiler supplied by Java Runtime Environment. For the UI, the screens are processed and displayed in Javascript and HTML by the execution framework of Google GWT.
An additional design constraint of our transcoder was not only to make the generated code fully iso-functional but also highly readable and maintainable so that our customers can further evolve it via standard Open Source Java tools like Eclipse, Netbeans, etc.
Systems components:
The core technology is wrapped in and supported by various services components making a fully transparent and highly scalable process:
- a source code repository for both Java & Cobol: Subversion as the standard SCM of Open Source world
- a continuous integration platform: Jenkins as the most widely CI system used worldwide
- a relational database (mySql, Oracle, DB2, etc….) to store all information generated by the changes on software assets (new commits of changes in Cobol, generated Java, etc.) as well as all the various job executions corresponding to the processes of migration project
- an intranet application: Eranea’s Integrate itself based on Google GWT for rich interactions. It allows systems engineers, architects, developers to easily get reports about various executions of project processes, about progress in source code migration / validation as well as to get a very large palette of structural informations about their software assets (cross-references, coding patterns, quality of source code, etc…)
The core technology is clearly what represent the core added-value of Eranea. But, it gets accessible in the most efficient manner when it gets delivered by the appropriate technical architecture as delivered by the system components
