ENE" —-ae pa on ea z s W ude odla ranc Me kremi k. sa k ze žrajs | l [ ; | PO WEEKNAPPLICATION DEVELOPMENT APPLIED INTELLIGENCE. AVGUST 21, 1989 SAA's Application Generator Will Boost Productivity This ts Part / of a series of articles on IBM s Systems Application Ar- chitecture (SAA). The in- troduction of 1n- tegrated, comput- 'ing environ- ments such as SAA will have a major impact on the sofwware technologies of the 905. An important trend in the 1990s will be the rapid movement of application- development, functions from the main- frame environment to PCs. The low cost of mips (million instructions per sec- ond), faster response time, ease of use and substantial processing power of the programmable workstation makes it, an attractive environment for application development. integrated computing environments such as SAA will accelerate this trend by allowing programmers to develop enterprisewide applications on the PC that run on any supported SAA plat- form. Applications will incorporate seamless interfaces that enable informa- tion and processes to be distributed among all machines on the network. In the future, SAA-compliant; applica- tions will be developed using a highly integrated application-development envi- ronunent consisting of front-end CASE tools, a common repository of design in- formation and a back-end SAA applica: tion generator. The integration of these facilities into a common development environment represents a major chal- lenge for IBM and other vendors. The industry's current application-de- velopment, procedures are far from the ideal described above. Most applications are still developed by hand, using con- ventional third-generation languages such as COBOL or FORTRAN. Hand- cralted applications reguire a great deal of time and effort, are very expensive and often don't meet users' needs. A ma- h jor objective of SAA is to improve pro- prammer productivity through the pro- vision of automated application-genera- tion tools. The primary component of SAA that will be used for the automatic generation of applications is the SAA application generator. The function of the application generator is to create code that is compliant with the User, programmer and communication inter- [aces defined by SAA. Cross System Product (CSP), an IBM fourth-generation language, has been designated as the SAA application gen- erator, CSP was originally designed to allow for consistent applications across different IBM platforms. Initial offerings of CSP were relatively weak compared with other vendors' products. It has since matured into a competitive appli- cation generator, In CSP's current form, applications are developed on a System/370, but exe- Cutable versions can be generated for the PC and the 8100 MVS, VM and DOS. An executable ver- machine, as wel] as sion of CSP is also being developed for the AS/400. Although CSP is a good mainframe- . based application generator, it is not yet SAA-compliant. Applications can be generated and run on the AS/400 and PS/2, but they must be maintained on the System/370. CSP's built-in screen painter is System/370-based, and is not even Common User Access (CUA) 3270 at that. Finally, communications are missing entirely. It is only by using awk- ward external products that some sem-. blance of connectivity can be simulated. When the application-generation facili- ties are put on the programmable work- station, the programmer will be able to tion generator and the facilities of the Common Programming Interface-Com- ' munications (CPI-C), eration functions will take at, least, a application generators are not to be ig- nored; the integration of CASE and ap- application development. The dilemma for organizations that SKA Applicatioti Geieratot Shields Usets from Progtatiiming Interface Highlevel linguiage letg im iisets rapidly tonstrudt o applications withouta detailed knowledge of SAA services. | ! Repositoty. MERE Desidn i| | Speciticatloris smi -. 4 - Application GeneratoH. ' Converts specilicatjons into a running application | | Nj Pjogratnitilng LandUddes Presentation .., Dlalogue | Se Cotrinuinicatioti - latettace Dibtenosisi; REM : zika: za fair. Common Programinind Interface | John Avaklan IBM has a lot to do to develop Cross System Product ( CSP) into an application generator for its Systems Application. Architecture, but there are advantages to using CSP today. | two technology paths to pursue. One is | compliance with CUA and the develop- - ment of Cooperative-processing applica- develop applications that run on any | supported SAA environments. Applica-. tions developed with the application Benerator will access relationa] data | ae tions. The other is utilization of ar lica- (DDM A sečna Data Manager — tion-generator technology with CSP, DE ema to data ap rovideš transparent ac-' | to the current limitations of SAA, it is dale v wnere in the network. ' | ditnicult to pursue both | NE A the application generator |... Cooperative-proc »ssing applicationg tem running podkast will horde od be built today with SAA-compliant calis to modules and automatically lo- : eh oe using lower level languagca cate the module in the network. | neh as C COBOL, rather than CSP. As shown in the figure, application. GA ORELAJA currently provkle many generator o policate ol Sienji a Po), noce Jo eh, peer interfaceg and sophisticated development environment. — An gitemative strategy more in line peni pe paneli paPOgNOry will store — with the future of SAA ia to start now ne iniormation related to an appli. — with application-generation technology li | : cation, including screens, code an data ; definitions. Computer-aided software en- gineering (CASE) tools will be integrat- ed with the repository, the SAA applica: Unfortunately, the evolution of CSP to support these high-level applicatlon-gen- year. However, the productivity gains of plication generators is a major trend of want to use SAA today is that there are Lancs. based on CSP. This approach will grow to include other aspects of SAA. Although IBM has a lot of work to do to develop CSP into an SAA application generator, there are numerous advan- tages to using CSP today. ; CSP offers a screen painter for design- ing panels that interact with the user. This is a powerful productivity enhancer. The screen painter does not enforce CUA standards today; however, developers can use it to design screens that have some level of CUA conftor- mance. | The full, programmable-workstation CUA interface is still just a direction for CSP. The most reasonable CUA steps to take with CSP are to follow CUA guide- lines as closely as possible within the CSP screen painter. The database facilities of CSP are closer to the SAA ideal than the capabil- ities of the user interface. CSP provides excellent support. for both DB2 and SOL/DS. It automatically generates Structured Guery Language (SOL) from high-level CSP statements. The program- mer can either accept the generated SOL or, if more sophisticated data access is reguired, modify it. Because DB2 and SOL/DS both now provide some degree of homogeneous data distribution, CSP also has access to distributed data. CSP and the Data Manager On the programmable workstation, the relationship between CSP and the Data Manager is not as clean. It reguires the user to access an external COBOL module, which performs the database access. This will probably not be ad- dressed until the full CSP application-de- velopment environment is ported to the programmable workstation. Finally, the tools for implementing co- operative processing will not be avajl- able in the near future. It still is not clear whether CSP will provide commu- nications verbs, or if the subsystem run- ning CSP on a given machine will be re- Sponsible for accessing different mod- ules. CSP developers are hoping that the latter proves to be the case. It is possible to do some Cooperative processing today with CSP by using soft: ware that is available under both DOS and OS/2. You must, however, leave CSP to accomplish this. The tool to use is the | Enhanced Connectivity Facility (ECF). It provides the ability to build a shell around an application that can then be made up of components on different. machines. ECF provides the Conumunica- tion. This type of facility will continue to evolve under 0S/2 Extended Edition. ae ae Ora] article on SAA | a ae ose > acilities in the SAA | Pe a za S je one ME a To learn more about the sub; tof these articles, please call The Janis 'artin Report, an information service xlate: at (800) 2421940 90402 (213) 3938305. In Euro. com tact Savant, 2 New St., A ae con- LA5 9BX United K: ingdom (0524) 734 505.