HP paints transition picture for interfaces

Webcast suggests migrations can justify upgrades to application graphics

There’s more than meets the eye when migrating applications from the HP 3000 — but on the vendor’s latest Web-based program, HP suggested that a transition to a new platform might help get an application get a facelift.

Platinum partners and tools providers said on the latest Interfaces Webcast that spending 20 to 50 percent more to uplift a program’s graphical interface could get the whole project moving. The concept was one of several during the 90-minute show which advised customers how to handle issues migrating VPlus screens, technology which HP called proprietary for the first time.

Chris Koppe of Platinum partner Speedware said that so long as a migration was underway, improving a program’s utility through a new interface might be better justified. Technology purchases or manpower resources could be applied with the extra budget.

“You can redo the interface manually, by putting in new calls to a new graphical interface engine, or you can buy technology that will graphically enhance an existing character based engine,” Koppe said. “Ultimately you extend the life of the application.” Applications which look old “might not be as appealing to people who don’t know IT in your organization.”

“If a person is facing a $200,000 migration project, to spend $50,000 more to get a new interface on the application is not a lot of money in the big scope of things. But to ask for that money outside the scope of a migration might be a bigger chunk for an organization to buy off on.”

HP’s guests on the program — Platinum partners Speedware, MB Foster and MBS, as well as ScreenJet’s Alan Yeo, ERP app provider ExegeSys’ president Paul Dorius, WRQ marketing VP Dave Hebert and Ken Robertson of AD Technologies — outlined strategies to replace or emulate the MPE/iX VPlus presentation layer. Some plans broke no new ground, like retooling for Web browser-based interfaces, something HP has been promoting for three years.

Other tools discussed were new to the 3000 customer, like Acucorp’s Acubench development suite for COBOL. ScreenJet moves VPlus screens directly into the Acubench structured file format. “This kind of option is suitable for very fast conversion, as code changes are unnecessary,” Yeo said. “You can start testing your application very rapidly.”

Yeo also offered advice on using APIs. He said for customers with a well-written application, where all screen handling is consolidated into one set of routines, “going the non-VPlus API route [by removing all VPlus calls and replacing them with standard SCREEN calls] is a much cleaner route. It depends on how your application is written.” Typical applications have VPlus scattered throughout, however.

Acubench works as a developer’s environment, something that HP’s Webcast host George Stachnik said the 3000 has “always been weak in.” Yeo said that Acubench offers “a complete development environment to enhance the GUI screens generated by ScreenJet, to include elements such as list boxes, radio buttons without having to change your underlying code.

Ordina Denkart offers Wingspan, software developed in the 1990s to give non-3000 platforms a means to display 3000 application screens. COBOL VPlus screens can become character based screens or Java XML Web client GUI. The company also uses ED/WIN, which “handles your VPlus calls in COBOL code, and performs the screen handling using the Java XML tools,” said Al Gates of MBS.

Koppe also mentioned a tool from Cheops in Europe called APP2XML, which “takes VPlus calls and produces XML Web output, capturing calls.”

MB Foster founder Birket Foster said that Web-based interfaces offer a stateless interface, so “it’s going to take awhile for XML to provide a better handle on state between the user interface and the server. It’s a little early for Web and good performance. If you’re doing casual browsing and looking things up, the Web is a fine way to go.”

A customer asked during the Webcast’s Q&A session about response time of emulating VPlus on another platform versus translating VPlus calls to curses, the Unix screen handling facility. Robertson of AD Technology offered an opinion that block mode could be twice as responsive as curses.

“We found out the response in curses was a very mushy feeling, compared to the block mode snappiness from an HP terminal,” Robertson said.

HP’s host Stachnik then revealed what he called “a little known fact” to counter such mushiness. “If you use one of the free conversion kits HP is offering to change A-Class or N-Class server, one of the things that goes away is some of the throttling that goes away on the HP 3000 side of the fence.” Stachnik asserted that the end result was that customers converting an HP 3000 to a 9000 “get a faster box, to compensate for the mushiness.”

HP’s design reduces the A-Class CPU speed from 440MHz to 110 when used with MPE/iX. No such throttling had been reported for the N-Class processors, however.