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New Year 1998
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Hemel Hempstead-based open systems supplier JAC has migrated Alusuisse Thermosplastics, a division of industrial giant Alusuisse-Lonza, to a client-server architecture based on jBASE.
Alusuisse Thermoplastics selected jBASE to enable the rapid migration of its legacy applications from a ‘traditional’ ADDS Mentor machine to a client-server network built around a Motorola AIX server and Windows NT. The new system will soon be utilising another product from the jBASE family, OBjEX, to provide direct access to centrally-held data from Visual Basic applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel.
Alusuisse are the latest in a series of blue-chip organisations to appreciate the benefits of the jBASE application and development environment.
According to John Amos, Managing Director of Alusuisse Thermoplastics, the project was not straightforward. “One of our principal criteria for success was that users would see no difference between the old and the new, so they would face no learning curve,” he said. “This was complicated by the fact that our legacy system was originally written in RPL, for which there has been little - if any - development over the past several years.
“In the event, however, the transition was remarkably smooth. Not only was the migration transparent to users, but the performance gain was immediately noticeable - the system now works about fifteen times faster than previously. This has made a real difference to our efficiency levels, as some aspects of our integrated suite of commercial and financial applications were becoming very difficult to use - especially large enquiry exercises, such as stock valuations, and complex reports, which could take hours. These now take just a few minutes.”
jBASE achieves these gains in performace because it eliminates environment overheads, thus enabling applications to run as though they were native programs on the platform of choice. This is done by compiling the BASIC source code to C and then to machine code using the native server. Applications converted like this are then able to integrate seamlessly with other programs on the same platform.
The new system was operable almost immediately, thanks to extremely swift conversion of the legacy application code, although the entire project, including testing, took about three months to complete.
“We considered this suprisingly fast, considering the nature of the task,” said John Amos. “This was basically because the JAC support was so good - bugs were identified and fixed almost as soon as they appeared.”
For more information, contact Clive Ketteridge at JAC on (01442) 235515.
Last Updated: 09 November 1998