Future-Proofing PowerBuilder Systems that Provide Critical Citizen Services
This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on the EvolveWare Blog
When most think of legacy technology, the words “monolithic”, “mainframe”, “COBOL”, and “Fortran” easily come to mind. These are concepts that are over 50 years old. And so when organizations talk about application modernization, these are some of the technologies and programming languages that are typically discussed. However, the definition of what is considered “legacy” has expanded to include technologies that were developed much more recently as the rate of change has only increased. For example as the first versions of Java were released in the 90s, there is now “legacy” Java out there that organizations are looking to update and transform. Another such example is PowerBuilder. While it may not be as familiar to the general public, this “legacy technology” also became popular in the 90s and has been used to build many ERP and line-of-business applications across over 18,000 organizations worldwide including government, insurance organizations, and more.?
The Pros and Cons of PowerBuilder
PowerBuilder is an object oriented programming language. Its key selling point when developed was the DataWindow, which allowed for conversion of SQL to a visual representation and vice versa. Many developers familiar with the original Sybase PowerBuilder language find that applications built on it are reliable and that the language is easy to use and dynamic. However, as with many of the other legacy languages, one of the biggest issues in continuing to invest in applications written in this technology is that the talent pool of those with the knowledge of the language is shrinking. As the younger set of developers don’t typically learn this programming language, there is no guaranteed set of replacement personnel for those that did learn the language years ago but are either currently retiring or planning to retire imminently. And with most of the PowerBuilder career opportunities focusing more on maintenance of existing applications versus development, there is even less incentive for the younger set of developers to invest in this programming language. The situation being the way it is, organizations looking to the future must safeguard their operations and determine the best path forward for their PowerBuilder applications.
We typically advocate that those with PowerBuilder applications don't choose to just automatically migrate the code to a modern language as results are not optimal. Instead, we recommend leveraging business rules extraction (BRE) to truly achieve success in revamping these systems as part of a “business” transformation. We’ve spoken in detail about BRE and the modernization outcomes it can lead to. But let’s walk through a recent customer example to show you what they were able to accomplish using the Intellisys platform while planning for their PowerBuilder modernization effort.
State Financial Agency: Planning a PowerBuilder Modernization Initiative using Agile BRE
A large state agency that deals with financial matters was looking to obtain an in-depth understanding of one of their payment systems in order to plan for the future and mitigate risks related to talent and maintenance. The system consisted of just over 210K lines of COBOL and 40K lines of PowerBuilder code. The agency was looking for a vendor that provided support for multiple application languages and that could deliver a truly in-depth understanding of the system in question including consolidating the pieces of logic into higher level policies or “rules”. EvolveWare and the Intellisys platform’s Agile BRE solution was chosen, which applies automation to the process of rules extraction and doesn’t require code freezes during the project.
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Every modernization project that uses the Intellisys platform starts with providing comprehensive and 100% automated documentation of the system or systems in question. This documentation includes both graphical and non-graphical artifacts including an assessment report as well as system and program flow diagrams and entity relationship diagrams. These artifacts allowed the state agency to:
Then alongside a small services partner, the EvolveWare team used the intelligent automation features in the Intellisys platform to consolidate, categorize, and annotate the business logic in order to create high level business rules. In total, the effort to document and extract rules from the entire system took just about 3 months. The state agency is now in the process of reviewing the rules in their current system to determine which ones to keep, retire, or update as they figure out the best solution for a modern system moving forward. By having a full inventory of their current rules, the agency won’t miss out on any critical policies that need to be implemented in the modern version of the system.
Looking Ahead to the Future
While legacy systems have performed well and lasted for far longer than some may have expected, organizations must start thinking about the future in a world where the rate of change is accelerating and knowledge of these older technologies is shrinking. Even for a “relatively” newer technology like PowerBuilder, being proactive versus reacting when something goes wrong can mean the world of difference to an organization’s current and future operations and bottom line. Similar to the state agency use case discussed above, assessing your applications and understanding the policies contained within them is a good first step to getting ahead of and eventually implementing a PowerBuilder modernization or any other modernization effort.
Contact us to get your PowerBuilder modernization questions answered and learn more about how EvolveWare can help.