OK, so what is it? Well in my thinking, it's where you have applications that are effectively performing 1 or more business functions for your organisation. They aren't the "rising star" applications - more the "cash cow" applications. You have already invested in them, you maintain them - they just do the job. Some people call them Legacy Applications.
Quite often they are the "green screen" applications - great for data entry, built in a time when GUI sounded like something sticky that you didn't want to accidentally sit on!
The value here is the data AND function.
So how do you leverage this corporate asset?
Intelligent Screen Scraping
Sounds awful - scraping the screen. Let's use another phrase to cover this - "screen interception". There's a few products that can intercept the information from the server that was normally displayed on a dumb terminal or in some form of terminal emulator running on the user's PC.After intercepting the screen instructions, the software can display this to the user in a browser.
This "out of the box" transformation already delivers a benefit of not having to install any special software on the user's machine.
The next level of sophistication is to re-model the browser pages to leverage the power of using the browser and form objects such as date pickers, drop-down lists, etc. At this point we should also be contemplating how we could revamp the process so that the user interaction is streamlined and designed for ease of use.
We can do this by marshaling multiple "green screens" behind the scenes and presenting a single web page to the user. This more than compensates for the lack of "data entry speed" that some consultants claim is lost when moving from a character-based screen to a modern web page.
It is also possible to set up a framework that allows you to move some functions out into a web template and better utilise the server functionality.
Delving Deeper Into the Application
Once we have mapped our screens in this way, we can extend their use past the browser.
This can be done by combining screen interactions under a function and making it available in a SOA environment. There are various approaches in making the function available - it could be by exposing it as a Web Service with a SOAP interface or, more likely, a JSON interface.
It could even be made available to less sophisticated systems running on different operating systems or even different networks. This is where a product like LANSA's Integrator comes in handy. LANSA have done a lot of good work in continuing to refine, and add new functionality to, LANSA Integrator.
Of course there are other products out there - so it's a case of "horses for courses". But is you have an IBM i (aka AS/400) environment, then Integrator is the go.
