BLOOMFIELD, NJ – April 16, 2010 - Surround Technologies is focused on productive reuse of architecture; looksoftware is focused on productive reuse of legacy applications. Since both companies built their tools with an SOA philosophy, their partnership was a marriage made in heaven. And now the result of that marriage has arrived; a highly productive environment for rapidly modernizing applications.
looksoftware announced at COMMON the new application development toolset that it's calling re:new. The toolset will enable IBM i customers to extend existing applications and also rapidly deliver new functionality that leverages the .NET framework, according to Marcus Dee, looksoftware CEO. The resulting applications may blend existing and new functionality, with the automated development process being five to ten times faster than traditional manual coding, he said.
Using re:new, companies can significantly reduce time to value by leveraging framework-based generation to provide pure SOA-based applications. With re:new, developers can modernize existing systems, build new ones, or produce a mixture of both. re:new supports multi-channel User Experience (UX) delivery including a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) based rich client and the cross-platform Web-based Silverlight RIA.
"looksoftware has traditionally offered IBM i customers the opportunity to preserve their legacy assets via reuse" said Dee. "Our Path Forward announcements extend our reuse focus to include integrated support for new development, to provide our customers and ISV partners with long term paths forward.”
re:new allows developers to quickly and easily provide integration and interoperability with existing IBM i applications. It produces loosely-coupled agile service oriented software that includes backend operational management, security, and authentication. This ensures best practices and dramatically reduces programming time throughout the development life cycle.
Fueling and retail management systems provider MECO, has successfully implemented the re:new technology to reuse its customized Infor System/21 back-end ERP. re:new has enabled MECO to deliver major new functionality that streamlines business processes by integrating the IBM i with its Microsoft-based front-end. IT manager Albert M Johnson said, "I'm a long time IBM i customer and thanks to re:new, I'm now an IBM i customer with a services oriented architecture in place and we have a future--I can see the path forward!”
re:new leverages Surround Technologies’ development framework, together with looksoftware's soarchitect, and existing support for multi-channel clients, to provide the most effective UX.
###
