pro et con | NStop MigMan : Analysis - Reengineering

NStop MigMan - Specifications for Tenders

NStop MigMan (Migration Manager) is a tool for software migration and for the evolution of HP NonStop applications.

NStop MigMan joins scientific compiler construction know-how with special knowledge from successful HP NonStop projects.

NStop MigMan supports all migration paths of a HP NonStop application (sources, masks, transaction monitor, files).

The following table shows the migration paths from basic components of a HP Nonstop application to the regarding migration target:

Basic system	Target system
HP NonStop COBOL85	COBOL for UNIX(Linux)
TAL	C++
Enscribe	SQL (Oracle, MySQL,..)
SCREEN COBOL	Java Clients
Pathway	alternatively CORBA, TUXEDO, RPC,...

The tool contains the following compiler frontends:

COBOL,
SQL,
TAL,
Enscribe.

This enables a migration with a compiler's high granularity.

Target systems are UNIX and Linux based hardware architectures.

NStop MigMan - The Integrated Components

ScreenConv

ScreenConv realises the automatic conversion of requestors developed in SCREEN COBOL to browser based user interfaces.

[ScreenConv - target architecture]

The actual conversion process consists of 2 phases. First information about the included elements (e.g. input fields), their positions and the so called "messages" is extracted from the mask programs with the help of a mask parser ("screen scrapping"). Then the building of the new HTML masks with exact positioning is made as well as the generation of the adapted messages to process them.

There is a run time system integrated which communicates the information from the new masks by the generated messages to the user programs. This run time system is highly adaptable to special customer needs (e.g. corporate identity for the masks).

The following PDF document contains some screenshots of converted SCREEN COBOL masks:

Screenshots of converted SCREEN COBOL masks[114 KB]

Enscribe migration

There are 2 tool functionalities:

Generation of unloading programs, which write the Enscribe files on HP NonStop into ASCII files.
Generation of SQL create-scripts to create SQL tables on the target system.
Generation of control files for the SQL loader to load the ASCII files into the SQL tables.
Conversion of Enscribe commands within the sources to SQL statements.

COBOL conversion and integration of modern middleware

With a dependency test the sources to migrate can be checked for completeness before their conversion:
[COBOL conversion - dependencies]

The HP NonStop specific COBOL constructs are replaced by universal statements, e.g.:

Unpacking of libraries:
The ?SECTION structuring is converted to COPY files.
Conversion of ?SOURCE commands:
?SOURCE commands are converted to COPY commands and the paths are adapted to the generated directory structure.
Adaption of formatting:
The indicator column is set from 1 to 7 and the line feed is inserted into column 72.
Further automatic conversions:
e.g. renaming of NAME, conversion of ENTER resp. ENTER TAL, commenting out paragraphs like SOURCE-COMPUTER, ...

After the conversion the generated target code can be verifyed with the integrated COBOL frontend:
[COBOL conversion - analysis]

TAL to C/C++ conversion

The conversion of TAL programs to C/C++ is realised by the tool "TAL to C/C++ Translator" (TTC).
A detailed description of the TTC you'll find under products / TAL to C/C++.

NStop MigMan - The GUI
A comfortable user interface realised as an Eclipse Rich Client allows to control all activities of NStop MigMan. Via the user interface migration projects can be instantiated, edited and managed. Several resulting windows log the progress of the migration steps and document success resp. error messages.

NStop MigMan - Technical Data

Current version	NStop MigMan 2.0
System requirements	Operating system: Windows 2000 / XP / 7 Working storage: min. 512 MB RAM Free fixed-disk storage: ca. 300 MB
NStop MigMan uses the following open sources	Java (TM) Runtime Environment, Standard Edition, from version 6 Perl, Production Release, from version 5.8.8

The text above can include company names, trademarks or registered trademarks of the corresponding firms. Their report isn't made in the sense of trademark right.