Business Computer Design (BCD), provider of application and business process modernization tools for IBM i professionals, has invested thousands of hours improving its Clear PATH Modernization Suite, allowing product developers to enhance many suite components.
Many important improvements have been made to all the products in the suite, and several other enhancements are forthcoming, the company says. Collectively, these advancements make it even easier for developers to bring existing RPG applications to the Web, develop new PHP or RPG Web applications, create real-time Web reports, distribute reports and documents, and control access to enterprise information. All of these components are designed to help extend the value of existing computing infrastructure investments.
The BCD Modernization Suite offers a nearly seamless integration between all of its components. Each component is available as an individual solution or as part of the entire integrated suite. The suite consists of all of the products highlighted below along with their new features.
WebSmart ILE, Improved with XML and LDAP
WebSmart ILE, BCD's rapid Web application development tool, added support for LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) in its latest release. These new features allow a developer to create connections to different LDAP data sources and manage entries in those sources. LDAP is a cross platform client server protocol that is becoming increasingly popular for querying and modifying directory information.
WebSmart 8, currently available to existing clients and soon to be GA, includes new XML functions that simplify XML document processing and parsing. These functions allow you to easily open an XML document, parse the document into a tree, retrieve elements and their children, get sets and subsets of elements, traverse the document tree, and more. The added functions are also capable of handling all memory management behind the scenes, so the developer can focus on writing the application.
WebSmart PHP Improves Change Management Support
WebSmart PHP's built-in change management feature has added support for the FTP path to offer a more complete process. This enhancement automatically directs new content and makes it easier to publish, manage, and organize content on your business website.
Wnd while not an enhancement to WebSmart PHP, the inclusion of Zend Core in IBM Power System shipments makes it even easier to install WebSmart PHP as it runs over top of Zend Core when hosting your PHP apps on the IBM i.
Nexus Portal Integrates with Google Search Appliance
The upcoming version of Nexus, BCD's portal for secure and controlled access to Enterprise information, is currently available to existing clients and soon to be GA. This version has many important new features and gets a huge boost with the addition of a Google Search Appliance portlet. Nexus users can now search any network drives they index with the Google Appliance in addition to the documents in the Nexus ECM. Aside from users accessing all their documents from one location, they can also get full text searching and search result text previews. In addition, Nexus will load and render pages faster in this next release because of code optimization and structural improvements.
The current version of Nexus Portal now allows users to save documents uploaded to the Nexus ECM onto a Windows or Linux server in addition to the IFS.
Presto Runs on V5R3 and V5R1
The minimum operating system release level of IBM i required to run Presto, BCD's rapid green-screen to Web enabling tool, is now V5R1 instead of V5R4. Additionally, there is now an option to run Presto without needing to install the WebSphere Application Server for all OS release levels supported by Presto.
Clover Query Support for IBM Query/400
Version 1.6 of Clover, BCD's real-time IBM i Web reporting and querying tool, now has the ability to import query definitions from IBM Query/400. The Query/400 definitions can be output as real-time Web reports, graphs, spreadsheets or interactive drill-downs with optional prompts and filters, bringing new life to tens-of-thousands of existing reports that have been defined in IBM's 20-year-old query tool.
The following query options are all retained: selected fields, file joins, calculated fields, sort fields, comparisons and level breaks. You can further customize and modify the imported queries in the Clover IDE with the codeless SQL wizard as well as customize the appearance of your report, and thereby overcome a major constraint of Query/400. End users can then access all these professional looking reports from a browser; no other PC software is required.
Catapult Sees 15X Performance Improvement
Catapult, a PC and IBM i client/server application for automated report and document distribution, has been rewritten in a modern language which has yielded huge performance increases-up to15 times faster in most cases. It has also been completely redesigned and has a more modern and intuitive XP/Vista looking UI and a new Grab Rule Editor that improves the process flow when creating new distribution rules.
Another reason for rewriting Catapult in a modern language was to take advantage of more modern controls and interfaces available in C#, which improved the email process, for example. Using a mainstream language that is widely used by the BCD development group for their other products makes it easier to transfer developer skill sets and results in faster delivery of new features for Catapult customers.
Availability
All of the components in the BCD Modernization Suite can be acquired in a bundle, or licensed separately. For more information, call BCD at 630-986-0800, or forward your request to
About BCD
BCD has received nearly 40 industry awards, including eight for Catapult, for software excellence. It has more than 30 years experience in the IBM midrange marketplace. More than 30,000 copies of its software products have been licensed worldwide by more than 10,000 organizations. BCD is a member of IBM's System i ISV Advisory Council and is an IBM Advanced Business Partner.
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