Trilogy

Trilogy taps ASNA Services department to resuscitate its AVR Classic code!

At a glance…

Customer profile:

Established in 2002, Trilogy Capital Management, LLC, is based Powal, California. It offers asset management services to banking and financial institutions throughout the US.

Situation:

Trilogy had written an ASNA Visual RPG Classic Windows application many years ago. The app had served them well but business needs required a browser-based application.

Solution:

The ASNA Services department, in conjunction with some special help from the ASNA R&D team, migrated the 250+ AVR Classic programs for Trilogy.

Benefits:

Many thou- sands of lines of proven business logic code were able to be reused; the Trilogy staff didn’t need to acquire specialized code migration skills for this one-time migration; the resulting app pro- vides the foundation for the next generation of Trilogy’s application portfolio.

Products:

AVR.NET, DataGate, IBM i, i5, DB2/400, Visual Studio .NET

Trilogy Capital Management, LLC, provides asset management outsourcing to banking and financial institutions through a variety of specialized services. Since 2002 Trilogy has provided its services from its headquarters in Poway, California to clients throughout the United States.

Trilogy prides itself on its use of technology to keeps its competitive edge sharply honed. Says Information Technology Manager Bill Fox, “Our business thrives on being able to perform efficiently and correctly. Using high quality, highly responsive software is a key to our success.”

Initial success with AVR Classic

Bill Fox Quote A long-time System i shop, Trilogy had many years ago turned to ASNA for help improving the UI of its green screen applications. Using ASNA Visual RPG (AVR) Classic, Fox and his team built a back office application that served as the cornerstone of IT operations. As a fat client/server application, the application was installed on every desktop. It connected directly to Trilogy’s System i. Users vastly preferred the graphical UI of the AVR Windows over the green screen application it replaced. For many years, the AVR application did a great job for Trilogy.

Continues Fox, “The old application did indeed do a great job for us for a long time. But, because it was a fat client, requiring installation on Windows desktops, it didn’t lend itself well to the siren call of the Internet and customer demand for anywhere, anytime browser-based access. With the advent of the Web, our business was quickly changing. We needed the business agility to answer customer demand for browser-based access to our software. We had to find a way to resolve this issue.”

Beyond the business case of needing a browser-based application, another driver for needing to replace the aging AVR Classic application was its dependence on the Windows COM model. While support for AVR Classic is still firmly in place at ASNA, the ability to continue to support AVR Classic isn’t entirely in ASNA’s hands. For example, Microsoft has already made some changes that limit AVR Classic’s abilities (for example, due to MS-imposed changes, you can’t develop or maintain AVR Classic Web apps on Windows Vista or Windows 7). The handwriting is clearly on the wall and Fox knew that to be progressive he needed to be ahead of the curve when support for the MS COM platform is either unavailable or too expensive to be viable.

To the Web and beyond!

ASNA’s Visual RPG for .NET has an AVR Classic-to-NET Upgrade Assistant (UA) built into it. However, the UA only helps automate the upgrade of AVR Classic Windows apps to AVR for .NET Windows apps. Because of the dramatic programming model differences, it can’t help automate the upgrade from AVR Classic Windows apps to browser-based versions. That’s where the ASNA Services team came to the rescue.

Fox explains, “We had nearly 300 AVR Classic programs representing thousands of lines of code—rewriting that code would have been prohibitively expensive and time consuming. While I knew the parts of the code per-forming UI-related tasks would need to be rewritten, I really wanted to find a solution that let us leverage our investment in the business logic parts of our AVR Classic Code. It took a long time to write that code and it was proven and tested.”

No one of us is as smart as all of us

Bill Fox Quote To solve his dilemma, Fox turned to ASNA’s Services team. The ASNA Services team brings a unique set of skills to the table. The members are all highly skilled at .NET programming (using either ASNA Visual RPG, VB.NET, or C#) and they also have a superb knowledge of the System i platform. If it runs on Windows and connects to the System i and these guys can’t do it, it can’t be done! And, like all good programmers, they like a good challenge.

Says ASNA Services Director, Rick Farina, “The Trilogy project intrigued us. It’s quite a challenge to convert a COM-based fat Windows application to a browser-based application. After several visits with Bill Fox and his team to fully understand requirements we were able to sketch something on the whiteboard that we thought was quite doable.”

Farina knew that without being able to automate parts of this project that the project’s status would rapidly escalate from “conversion” to “rewrite.” That being the case he couldn’t hope to deliver on time and on budget. There was a desperate need to reuse whatever AVR Classic code possible for the new Trilogy Web app. He discussed the challenge with the ASNA R&D team. They were able to provide some project-specific custom tooling that the ASNA Services team used to extract the pure business logic from the original Trilogy AVR Classic application. There was still hand coding required, but the R&D team’s efforts enabled Farina and his team to focus primarily on hooking up the new browser-based user interface to the now converted-to- .NET business logic.

“This was truly a team effort,” explains Farina. “And although it was a lot of work, with the help of R&D and their specialized tooling skills, we here at ASNA were able to make the Trilogy conversion project a success. I’m proud of the ASNA Services team and really appreciate the help we got from ASNA’s R&D team.”

The Trilogy Web conversion product is a great example of the kinds of work that the ASNA Services team can do. The projects they can do often defy categorization—and often seem undoable at first. Farina again, “I’m proud that our team is so well-rounded. We’ve done ASNA Visual RPG projects with the System i, C# projects with MS SQL Server, and VB.NET projects with Web services. No matter what kind of project you have, we’re here to help you!”

Mission accomplished

For Trilogy, the ASNA Services team saved the day. The project was delivered in a fraction of the time and cost that a new-from-scratch Web application would have required. The application provided Fox and his team with the Web-based interface their users are demanding. While the ASNA Services team was converting the application for Trilogy, Fox and his development team took an ASNA Visual RPG Web class—so they now also have the skills to maintain and enhance the new application. As the new Web application is being deployed, Fox and his team are already planning a “Short Sale” Web application with the help of the ASNA Services team.

Concludes Fox, “We wanted the ability to offer a public interface for our clients and customers to access their accounts. With the new system ASNA has provided we accomplished that. The conversion efforts the ASNA Services team provided let us reuse lots of our old code and that dramatically helped move the project along. Without ASNA, we couldn’t have done this project!”