Legacy app modernization company Mobilize.Net has this month announced its Web Modernization Accelerator Program (WebMAP) as a means of moving Visual Basic 6, .NET, and PowerBuilder applications to the Web.
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Application modernization tools of this kind feature automated analysis and transformation functions that work on source code which may be as old as 15 to 20 years. If this code is outdated, obsolete, or unsupported the argument exists to transform and modernize the app which its serves.
"There are billions and billions of lines of legacy VB6, .NET, and PowerBuilder code in enterprises today. Modernization technology can provide migration solutions that are more efficient and less risky, preserving the value of the business IP in the legacy code, while updating the architecture to breathe new life into aging software assets," said Tom Button, CEO of Mobilize.Net.
The .NET Chosen One
Button says that WebMAP can move working code to the latest web architecture, without introducing the bugs or project risks that plague manual rewrites. According to Button, this technology is Microsoft's "chosen migration solution" for .NET.
"It generates 100% native code with no reliance on proprietary third-party runtimes with costly ongoing license fees. Moreover, it reduces the number of lines of code developers need to write and reduces the cost of development. All of this allows the development teams to focus on adding new features that take advantage of the target platform rather than throwing out and rewriting functionality that works," he said.
Features of the WebMAP automation technology include automatic code separation technology to divide application code between web clients and servers. The resulting application is multi-tier, multi-tenant, and web-enabled and therefore potentially more suitable for mobile device clients and Software-as-a-Service models.
WebMAP offers the ability to customize the tooling to fit specific needs such as preferred architecture, custom component mappings, and company coding standards. There is also semantic rather than just syntactic code analysis and transformation, resulting in a code base on the new platform that is said to "accurately reflect" the developer's original intent with pattern matching and optimizations over blocks of code, not simply line by line.
