NATURAL APPLICATION MIGRATION - Metalogic Systems Papers/Natural... · Natural/ADABAS Migration...

Confidential 9/1/2009

NATURAL APPLICATION MIGRATION

This white paper presents an approach towards migration of Natural/ADABAS to an open system. Along with benefit of migrating to an open system, this document also summarize the various issues and challenges which head up during the process and how a tool based approach can help to meet the desired end. A case study showcasing a Natural/ADABAS migration project, carried out by Metalogic System is encompassed in the document

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of Metalogic Systems.

Metalogic Systems Pvt. Ltd.

J 1/1,, Block EP & GP, Sector V, Salt Lake, Kolkata – 700 091

Office: +91 33 2357 8991-94 | Fax: +91 33 2357 8989

Web site: http://www.metalogicsystems.com


Table of Contents:

Executive Summary ....................................................................... 3

Introduction .................................................................................... 4

What is Migration? ........................................................................ 5

Advantages of Migration ............................................................... 6

Key Advantages of Tool based migration .................................... 6

Natural/ADABAS Migration Issues ............................................. 7

Conversion to Pseudo-Conversational (Quasi-Re-entrant) communication ......................... 7

Conversion of Natural Maps to JSP/ASP.NET pages .......................................................... 7

Generation of Control class, Connection Class and Communication class .......................... 7

Metalogic NATURAL Express Migration Solution ................... 8

Natural Migration Strategy .......................................................... 9

The Migration Overview....................................................................................................... 9

The Migration Details ........................................................................................................... 9

Reverse Engineering ............................................................................................................. 9

Inventory Reporting ............................................................................................................ 10

Forward Engineering .......................................................................................................... 10

Deployment Architecture .................................................................................................... 10

Metalogic Express Migration Benefits ....................................... 11

Business Benefits ................................................................................................................ 11

Technical Benefits .............................................................................................................. 11

Case study ..................................................................................... 12

About Metalogic Systems ............................................................ 13

Services offered .................................................................................................................. 13

Our Partners/Alliances ........................................................................................................ 13

Contact US .......................................................................................................................... 13


Executive Summary

In order to keep pace with upcoming technologies and business needs, organizations are keen

to migrate their applications and database from legacy systems to an open system. Such

projects involved lot of challenges in terms of complexity , cost and common risk like

introduction of new error, incompatibility with new systems and unreliable supporting

resources. This document describes one of such case which involved migration from

Natural/ADABAS to an open system.

The paper describes why there is a need to migrate to an open system along with the issues

and pain points like conversion to pseudo conversational communication and conversion of

Natural maps to JSP/ASP.Net pages, faced during Natural/ADABAS migration. This

document also talks about how Metalogic System’s strategy and methodology which

involved tool, performing major activities like reverse engineering , inventory reporting and

forward engineering can help to migrate to open systems like COBOL.

The paper encompasses a case study of a major automobile company in Japan where

Metalogic along with Satyam implemented migration (COBOL-NATURAL-ADABAS-

Assembler to MF-COBOL and Oracle) project.


Introduction Business processes change over a period of a time, attributing to the rapid development in

operating processes of business or technological advancements. This requires a substantial

re-work on the existing system if not adopting a new one. So should one do in such dynamic

environment? The systems and applications used may have become obsolete over a period of

time but the truth remains that the inherent business logic is still standing firm. It is the

source of the competitive advantage one has supporting unique business processes and

containing invaluable knowledge and historical data.

Apart from these issues some other disturbing concerns for someone working on some old

systems and applications are that of paying up huge sums of money for hardware and

software licenses. In these systems there is also a huge dependency on the vendors itself for

after sales services, i.e. maintenance etc.

Scalability of these systems is very difficult due to various technical difficulties. Since the

business policies and decisions are rigid and there is a pre-defined process flow,

compatibility and integration with latest technologies that have become the standard of the

business now-a-days is also difficult. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hire

developers qualified to work on applications written in languages no longer found in modern

technologies.

Software AG developed a 4 GL Natural language program, which usually run on the

ADABAS database. Through the years, ADABAS/Natural® has been a very popular

environment for developing business applications particularly in the Eighties. But with the

advent of newer technologies and development platforms, particularly with the ever-

increasing usage of the World Wide Web, organizations are looking for a solution to come

out of the NATURAL-ADABAS platform to more open systems, primarily due to the

following reasons –

1. Cost – The license and maintenance costs are very high

2. Resource – Natural-ADABAS resources are very rare in today’s world

3. Agility – Modern development technologies like Java and .NET are more agile to

modifications, integrations and enhancements


What is Migration? An organization has to adapt according to the changing needs and find a way out to cut cost

expenses occurring due to the old technology. But at the same time, one can’t start

everything from the scratch. This is because most of applications are so huge and complex

that it will take years to develop the same business logic in some other platform. In the

present constraints the most feasible way that remains is that of migrating the applications

and data to other leaner and advanced technologies which provide a cost-effective and equal

if not more efficient solution for day-to-day operating of companies. However in this case,

the recurring costs of the entire systems will be so low that break even is very easily

accomplished.

Let us look at the case of legacy systems, despite the availability of more cost-effective

technology, about 80% of IT systems are running on legacy platforms. International Data

Corp. estimates that 200 billion lines of legacy code are still in use today on more than

10,000 large mainframe sites. Driving the need for change is the cost versus the business

value of legacy systems, which according to some industry polls represent as much as 85-

90% of an IT budget for operation and maintenance.

(Source: www.developer.com - Article by Mr. Federico Zoufaly)

Governments and large corporations maintain huge amount of the legacy software as part of

their IT infrastructure. In 2008, 490 companies of the Fortune 500 are still using legacy

systems to process more than 30 billion transactions or $1 trillion worth of business each and

every day.

Three broad categories are defined for migration projects based on the recent trends in the

industry:

• Language Migration

Legacy applications to multi tier applications based on J2EE or Dot Net.

• Database Migration

o Flat to RDBMS

o Hierarchical to RDBMS

o Network to RDBMS

o RDBMS to RDBMS


• Platform Migration

Application running on old application server platforms needs to be ported to latest

application server platforms.

Migration can be manual or tool based. Different organizations use different alternatives to

achieve the desired quality of code with given budget and timelines. Now we analyze why an

automated tool based migration provides better stability to the system and proves to be

advantageous.

Advantages of Migration

• Integration of server and other resources for better performance

• Opportunity of aligning system architecture and standardizing the platform for

optimized performance

• Ease of usability and maintenance, that too at much lower costs

• Better availability of technical resources, as the number of people having

knowledge of older technology is lesser anyways

• With the standardized processes and platform scalability can be achieved

much easily with expansion of business

• Resolving the issue of extensive dependability on domain specialists

Key Advantages of Tool based migration The benefits of a successfully implemented tool based migration process can be summarized

as

• Migration Vs Redevelopment for legacy systems

o Substantial reduction in time and cost

o Requires 1/3rd the time compared to manual re-engineering

• Manual error chances are reduced to zero

• Efficiency of about 400% can be reached

• Bug detection in old system very easy. Also fixing doesn’t require checking of the

entire system again. Rather, fixing at one place can help sort the entire system’s error

due to the single bug.


In today's business environment, it is vital to know when to adopt new technology and when

to keep current applications in place. The challenge is to understand when doing business in

the current environment has become more painful than the task of migrating to a new

environment.

Natural/ADABAS Migration Issues

Conversion to Pseudo-Conversational (Quasi-Re-entrant) communication

A Natural program is conversational in nature that is it sends the display screen to the

terminal and waits for the response from user. But after migration into event driven

programming environment the communication becomes pseudo-conversational where the

program may send the screen to terminal and need not wait for the user’s response. Upon

getting user’s response, the program is re-invoked by the TP-Monitor. The program’s local

memory is initialized each time when it is re-invoked. However, the program can get back

the state of previous run (value of the state variables) by storing them in Common-Area.

Common-Area preserves the persistent data, to be retrieved by the program when required.

During migration it has to be ensured that

• On receiving user’s response, the program should be able to re-start execution from

the statement immediately after the screen interaction point. These points are termed

as re-start-points.

• When re-invoked, the local memory of the program must be restored to the state

when it was exited for user’s interaction.

Conversion of Natural Maps to JSP/ASP.NET pages

Interpretation of Natural Map definition and generate JSP/ASP.NET page. However,

enhancement in Look & Feel features, insertion of graphical objects and relocation of

controls has to be taken care of by manual effort.

Generation of Control class, Connection Class and Communication class

These components are required to meet the architectural considerations in .net environment.

Control class controls the activation of a chain of program sequence as per BL demand. It

also deactivates a dead chain. Communication class serves as carrier for data & messages

between the programs and between the Page and program.


Metalogic NATURAL Express Migration Solution Metalogic Systems provides a comprehensive solution for automated transformation of

legacy NATURAL applications to open systems on a modern development environment.

Aided by its sophisticated set of software transformation tools, Metalogic has delivered

application migration services to more than twenty customers all over the world.

Metalogic’s migration solution helps customer to –

� Recover, modernize and reuse business rules and data models embedded in their

existing applications

� Enjoy quick and accurate deliverables

� Reduce time, cost and risk

• Metalogic Natural/ ADABAS migration solution provides a comprehensive roadmap to

the mainframe Natural/ADABAS users to migrate to an open platform and tiered MVC

architecture.

• The solution covers migration of all application components including dialects, data

stores, user interface, job commands and transaction processing.


Natural Migration Strategy

The Migration Overview

The table below gives an overview Metalogic’s NATURAL Express migration strategy

Component Source Target

Dialect Natural COBOL , JAVA, C#

Data store ADABAS Oracle/DB2/SQL Server

Job Control JCL Shell Scripts

User Interface Natural Map JSP/ASP.NET

Architecture Host Based MVC

The Migration Details

The migration tool set performs three major activities –

1. Reverse Engineering

2. Inventory Reporting

3. Forward Engineering

Reverse Engineering

In this step, the natural source components as well as the database definitions for ADABAS

(ADAWAN and PREDICT) are fed into the tool, which parses the source components and

populates the repository with application information maintaining the links between all the

components in an appropriate database schema proprietary to Metalogic. This repository

Metalogic Tool set

Reverse Engineering

tools

Forward

Engineering tools

COBOL/ .NET/ Java components

Natural Source Components

REPOSITORY

ADABAS RDBMS

Inventory Reporting


containing detailed application information is subsequently used for generating inventory

reports and migrated source components in the target environment.

The major processes involved in reverse engineering are –

o Screen scraping

o Data model recovery

o Program understanding

o Identification of coupling and dependencies

Inventory Reporting

The inventory analysis tool runs on the repository populated with program information and

generate different reports on the source inventory including the

o Discrepancy reports like missing item reports and the unused items reports

o The cross-reference, association and dependency reports of the application

components

o Data access reports (CRUD).

This step in the migration process helps to finalize the source inventory to be migrated after

resolving the discrepancies

Forward Engineering

Once the repository is populated with the program information, Metalogic forward

engineering tool works on it and generates the various migrated components in the target

platform. The components generated for a NATURAL-ADABAS application are as follows

–

• GUI or Front end programs –

o JAVA – JSP and Java servlet controller

o NET – ASP.NET and C# controller

• Back-end (business logic) programs – COBOL on UNIX/Windows

• Data Access Layer – ESQL COBOL and SQL

• Data migration programs – ESQL COBOL, PL/SQL

Deployment Architecture

During migration, the monolithic NATURAL programs are re-factored and partitioned into 3

tier architecture with the Natural map components converted to JSP or ASP.NET and HTML.


The communication between the UI and the business logic programs, migrated to COBOL,

takes place through a servlet controller written in JAVA or C#. The data access is done

through a data access layer introduced by the Metalogic tool, which allows the migrated

programs to access the DB in the target platform with minimum changes in the program

sources.

The deployment architecture of the post-migrated application is shown in the diagram below

Metalogic Express Migration Benefits The tool based NATURAL migration solution provided by Metalogic is a fast, low cost and

reliable way to come out of the proprietary legacy application hosted on mainframes. The

major business and technical benefits derived by the customer are listed below –

Business Benefits

a. Reduce cost of ownership to a great extent within a very short period of time

b. Frees up maintenance budget to spend on enhancements and new initiatives

c. Makes application enhancements and integration easier

d. Eliminates resource (manpower) availability problems

Technical Benefits

a. Almost 100% automation- minimal manual work


b. Complete solution for language, database and platform modernization

c. Preserves valuable business logic of the existing application

d. Web application architecture – thin client (browser)

e. High automation ensures consistent quality and reduced risk

Case study


About Metalogic Systems Metalogic Systems is a twelve year old software services company based out of Kolkata, Providing technology solutions to its customers worldwide. The Company is an ISO 9001:2000 certified company. It is also certified for ISO 27001:2005 (BS 7799) for information Security Management Systems. Metalogic Systems provides consulting and implementation services to companies, intermediaries, and public sector bodies.

Services offered

• Legacy Application Modernization.

• Data Migration.

• Application Management Tool

• Reengineering & Documentation.

• ERP Implementation (SAP, MS Dynamics, Oracle EBS)

• Custom Software/website Development.

• Insurance Management.

Our Partners/Alliances

Metalogic Systems has formed strategic alliances with leading service and technology companies like, Hewlett-Packard, HCL Technologies, Satyam, Wipro, Oracle Corporation (For Oracle Applications) and Microsoft Corporation (for Microsoft Dynamics NAV) to provide solutions across the globe.

Contact US

INDIA

[email protected]

JAPAN

[email protected]

UK

[email protected]

USA

[email protected]

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