ITerative Consulting
Reducing risk in software development

jcTOOL Case Studies

The full application coverage capability of jcTOOL uniquely enables our customers to select their delivery model of choice - whether that be in-house, co-sourced or outsourced - but more importantly, to get their Forte/UDS applications converted and into production in the shortest amount of time using small teams.

Here are just some of our succesful customers:

Large New Zealand University

New Zealand’s first university, with over 19 000 students enrolled, runs their students administration suite of applications on Forté/UDS and Pascal for OpenVMS against an OracleRdb database. The migration of their Forté/UDS applications onto Java/J2EE and Oracle is being undertaken by ITerative’s preferred SI and global delivery partner, who are responsible for the end-to-end migration project.
The Forté/UDS applications, totaling about 650 000 lines of 4GL code, contain approximately 360 GUI windows and over 300 web-based (WebEnterprise) screens. The applications exhibit complex architectural requirements and numerous interfaces to legacy applications and databases.
The migration path chosen needed to allow for:
a ‘like for like’ conversion of application functionality and retention of application look and feel
limited availability of University IT staff resources
an automated conversion approach as a manual or semi-manual conversion was not feasible
the SI migration team’s limited prior knowledge of the applications
During the discovery phase of the project, the SI evaluated the Forté/UDS conversion methods and tools available in the marketplace. A Proof of Concept with ITerative Consulting’s jcTOOL quickly gave the SI the confidence to recommend to the University that they proceed with jcTOOL due to the comprehensive capabilities of the tool.
The SI was awarded the contract and the project included migration of the Forté/UDS code to Java/J2EE with rich-client windows being migrated to Java SWING and WebEnterprise screens migrated to JSP-based components, all using jcTOOL. The automated code conversion rate per application consistently ranges from 99.96% to 99.99%.
The SI delivered an initial group of migrated applications back to the University for acceptance testing and deployment into production. Following the succesful implementation of the inital batch of applications, the University took over the migration project and completed the rest of the application migrations in-house.
The following quote was provided by a member of the SI's migration team:
“Our developers, who have worked on code produced by jcTOOL, have found that the consistent structure of the code made it easy to understand and manipulate. The developers were impressed by how accurately Forté/UDS screens are converted into Java SWING code and are able to be executed with little or no change. jcTOOL makes it possible to convert a large Forté/UDS code base into an executable state in a minimal amount of time, leaving developers free to make small changes so that the application fully replicates the original.”

Motor Vehicle Distributor

The customer is a pre-eminent importer of Japanese motor vehicles and accounts for up to 6.7 percent of the Australian motor vehicle market. Over the last 10 years, the entire business Sales and Distribution application portfolio of the customer has been developed using Forté/UDS.
This application portfolio now constitutes some 20+ applications with a total of nearly 2 million lines of Forté/UDS code. The requirement was for the migration project to be resourced internally, so as to retain their intellectual property and in-depth knowledge of the applications into the future. This meant that their Forté/UDS developers must be cross-trained in Java/J2EE technologies during the course of the project. The solution needed to cater for this approach.
Additionally, the user base of the converted Java/J2EE applications was potentially going to be extended to other countires and international users, thereby requiring internationalization and localization capabilities to be introduced during the automated conversion process.
The customer has taken a strategic decision to sequentially migrate these applications using jcTOOL to a Java/J2EE platform after undertaking a successful pilot project. The automated code conversion rate now consistently ranges from 99.98% to 99.99% across the entire application code base.
The customer already has many of their applications in production.