Datapro banks on the Caribbean and Latin America for business. As an IBM software vendor and banking software developer, Datapro sold 22 new turnkey iSeries-based systems in 1999 to replace those developed by other vendors and users that didn't meet Y2K standards. Having sold an average of 15 new systems annually in previous years, the year 2000 was a boom for Datapro.

In 22 years, Datapro, which has 60 employees, has seen its share of shifts in demand. Despite trends, capricious or otherwise, Datapro achieved the best market penetration of any banking software vendor that served Latin America, with 110 AS/400 and iSeries clients in 26 countries using IBS. By converting IBS's RPG source to Java, the company reasoned, it could run on Sun Microsystems Solaris, IBM OS/400, and Microsoft Windows, and it could give banks what they wanted.

There are many ways to reshape RPG programs to produce a different end product, including a hand rewrite. But Datapro executives felt that IBS, with several million lines of code, could not be converted manually. According to the company's vice president, Richard Montero, rewriting this application was simply not an option. "It would have been too labor-intensive, and the time to market was simply unacceptable, given our customer commitments," Montero says.

In their quest to find the most expeditious way to create the new executables, the lead developers for IBS, explored their options. A couple years earlier, the application's front-end was made browser-accessible using JavaServer Pages, so with that done, they focused on converting the RPG business logic.

Datapro’s developers first explored the possibility of using consultants to convert the RPG to Java, but since some of the company’s customers were running customized versions of the IBS, the custom code would have to be converted as well. Furthermore, they intended to continue developing new versions of the IBS in RPG, so they needed control over the conversion process.

They decided that a tool to generate Java output, versus one with a proprietary fourth-generation language, was best. Upon searching the Web, they found Advanced Systems Concepts and ordered a copy of its RPG-to-Java conversion software, called RIO, to test.  Their decision followed quickly. "We sent them a couple programs, they did a conversion, we analyzed the resulting code, and then we made our decision," they say. "RIO gave us the tool to do it ourselves."

ASC's RIO converts RPG into C++ programs or Java classes. It preserves RPG business logic and translates it into Java and C++ programs. The finished product can be deployed on iSeries and other platforms. No development tools are required to maintain RIO's Java output, which is easily identifiable. RIO also includes Java and C++ templates to mimic functions that exist in RPG, but which are not provided in either Java or C++.

Datapro installed RIO in December 2003 and began its conversion in January 2004. While RIO can be used in conjunction with IBM's WebFacing Tool to produce browser-based user interfaces, this step was not necessary. "We didn't have to change the presentation layer at all,” the developers say.
They break the conversion down into a couple of steps. "First, you define the type of program you want, convert the program, import it in a Java ID, correct a few things that the conversion process doesn't do, and that's it," they add. "RIO converts 94 to 95 percent of the code for us. We have a few CL programs that we have to find another solution for, but 95 percent is great."

Besides the conversion, the lead developers are doing several other things at the same time. One of Datapro's intentions is to produce a product that will run on other hardware with an Oracle database, so the company has undertaken the normalizing of the existing database. Additionally, a new functionality that is currently being added to the IBS must also be completed before the conversion.

One thing for which they had to develop a different solution was communication between the business logic and the existing Java user interface. "We had the sockets communication framework that we use to communicate between the Java presentation layer and the business logic," developers comment, "We redid that in Java in the same protocol. We just converted the logic and replaced the socket server API with the new one that we wrote in Java, and that was it."

The projected date of completion for the multiplatform release of the IBS is March of 2005. "We will be able to hit that target," developers affirm. The progress made so far with RIO has given Datapro the confidence to sell the Java version now, with a promise of delivery next year.

ASC's software will also play an instrumental role in Datapro's conversion services. The development team notes that RIO enables Datapro technicians to convert custom RPG programs to Java while working at customer sites. The team leader states that "This will be important in the future".

Although Datapro has competition in the Latin American and Caribbean market, the company plans to maintain a dominant market position by continuing to serve their customers in Spanish or English, delivering the fastest implementation cycle of any vendor, and appealing to a broader audience with applications that run on OS/400, Windows, and Sun Solaris.