Inevitably, companies that have invested in technologies like RPG, face increasing difficulty enhancing and leveraging these systems to meet today's business needs for agility.  Without continued advancement, functional improvements, and support for contemporary development languages and service-oriented architectures, enterprises are faced with the inability to extend technology value to meet business needs; introducing additional risk to business imperatives, and increasing operational cost.

Proponents of new technologies often use the word "legacy" in the pejorative sense to describe any technology platform or application architecture that pre-ceded the one that they advocate.  That is not what we at ASNA propose.  Instead, ASNA subscribes to a list of tenants we use in every development solution we create:

1. Firstly, any modern application must address real business needs.  Any modernization effort including rewriting applications or purchasing new applications must be undertaken with a business purpose as the primary tenet.
2. A modern application can in fact include legacy code or legacy programs.  These are often referred to as Composite Applications and leverage the value inherent in applications that often reflect sound business practice and years of refinement.
3. A modern application is probably not just a new interface.  There may be situations where consolidating several "green screens" into fewer modern interfaces produces benefit, but graphical interface should rarely be taken as a single point initiative.
4. Sensible modernization strategies do not rely on the capture of 5250 data streams to present elements of the application as a service served up to the Web (Web services).
5. Modernization rarely means putting a wrapper around an application or a program in an attempt to simultaneously "insulate" it from a heterogeneous environment AND "integrate" it with other applications and business partners.
6. Modernization may require disentangling monolithic RPG applications into more flexible modules.
7. Modernization can mean converting programs to other languages that offer new capabilities.
8. A Modern Application should include the following:
   
   • Separate presentation layer, application logic, and data.
   • Be manageable and programmable by both existing and new development resources (RPG programmers, C#, etc).
   • Support smart client implementations (Windows and Web).
   • It must create or support a "unifying framework" for applications, data, people, and integration.  What makes the creating of a unifying framework so important is recognition that your own IT assets are probably heterogeneous (Windows, desktops, Unix, RPG, etc) and so are your customers and business partners with whom you must integrate or serve up your applications.

ASNA development solutions, in use at thousands of organizations have proven to enable development teams to successfully evolve their skills and the applications they support, helping to create modern applications, enable contemporary development strategies, and support agile organizations.

With ASNA solutions, modernizing RPG-based applications will be a success.