Charts and Graphs with LANSA WAMS

A little help please. I am looking for a good weblet that make it possible to offer dashboard type of items within a portal using LANSA WAMS. If anyone has seen it, let me know. Thanks for listening to a personal request.

LANSA Hosting and Managed Services

Do you need applications written in LANSA hosted on the web? Rippe and Kingston can provide iSeries servers to host your LANSA applications. Contact John Reuter for details at 513.977.4591 or jreuter@rippe.com. To learn more about Rippe and Kingston Systems, click here.

IONA & LANSA to Deliver SOA Enablement Tools for IBM System i

IONA and LANSA to Deliver SOA Enablement Tools for IBM System i Servers
11/01/2006

IONA® Technologies (NASDAQ: IONA), a specialist in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure solutions for performance-demanding IT environments, and LANSA, a provider of application development and integration software, today announced a broad technology, sales and marketing partnership. By combining the capabilities of IONA’s Artix™ extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and LANSA’s Integrator product the companies will deliver Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enablement technology for IBM System i servers (AS/400, iSeries and i5).

Read Details of Press Release

Great LANSA Conference

If you did not make it to the LANSA conference this year, you really missed a great one. The venue was spectacular. I will post some more photos next week. LANSA always addresses my most important issues: Food, Entertainment and Education! (Yes, it is usually in that order).

I must tell you that the Education program developed this year was spectacular. A couple of the sessions that I attended that should be noted are:

SOA...David Brault was brilliant and made a very confusing subject quite clear.
WAMS Education....very well thought out (I ran out of time, but will complete at home). Not sure how many people were required to generate all of this documentation. However, I heard that Madden had a book signing.

Rumor has it that the 20th anniversary will be something very special! One popular idea is a cruise/conference. That has my vote! Hope to see you at the conference next year.

A special thanks to everyone that attended our Portlet Generator Session on Monday! If you need more information...call 513/977-4544.

Hope To See You at the LANSA Conference

We are 10 days away from the LANSA Conference in Las Vegas. I am extremely excited about the program, training sessions and of course the location. Rippe & Kingston will have a session Monday afternoon from 3:30 - 4:00 on WAMS and Portals within WebSphere as well as other portals.

It is always nice to see familiar faces and hopefully some new ones as well. This year we have three attendees: Thom Davidson, John Reuter and Kent Oldham. Be sure and say hello to them.

You still have a little time to register.

Business Continuity & Online Backup and Recovery Services

Working with LANSA and a lot of iSeries (AS/400, System i5) clients, we are frequently asked about business continuity services and the very popular use of online backup. As a result Rippe & Kingston has partnered with VAULT400. In our opinion, when it is time to seriously address your Business Continuity Needs you want a Premier Managed Service Provider...VAULT400 delivers Secure Online Backup and Recovery Services and Solutions.

If you would like to learn more and receive a free technical brief please click here.

On Demand Presentations

If you have not noticed, LANSA has been doing some pretty interesting things on their web sites. They created a seperate site for RAMP with a nice user interface. They have several product overview videos and now are preparing some On Demand Presentations. Take a look at the RAMP site when you have a minute and register for one of their webinars. This is a good time to get management thinking about their plans for the next year.

LANSA User Conference

Hope to see everyone at the LANSA User Conference in the Autumn. I have been told that LANSA is going to offer some outstanding training sessions. Great time to put a little polish on some of your "slightly" rusty skills and learn new ones.

Find out more about the 2006 International LANSA User Conference

Oct 15 - 18
Red Rock Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada
http://www.lansa.com/conference

Visual LANSA WAM Weblets

LANSA WAMs productivity increases when a developer takes existing XSL Web Page Weblets that are shipped with the Visual LANSA IDE and copy these Weblets to make custom components. A Weblet can be a number of objects. A few examples include Checkbox, Drop Down, Clickable Images, Tab Pages, Tabs, etc. The power is really increased when the Weblets are linked as a visualization to a database field. The concept of storing the visualization with the field supports centralizing your inventory of components. When the field level components are used in one or more database files, the Weblet and all the field characteristics are available to the file and any functions the field is used in without further modifications.

Visual LANSA also uses wizards in which they call application templates. These wizards will generate completed web pages that allow developers to perform business/application activities. You can copy shipped wizards or create new wizards for your specific application. When you as a developer combine the power of the wizard with the custom Weblet functionality, your development productivity increases dramatically over traditional methods.

As an example, a developer can run a wizard to create a particular function, the wizard creates the application code, screen layouts, presentation layer, screen visualizations, business logic, validation rules, error routines, etc. and the developer has not written any code!

Additional comments are welcome from other LANSA Developers.

RAMP Movie

Click here to see a good overview of RAMP. It is a short presentation of the basic concepts of RAMP and how it can help you modernize your 5250 green screen applications and extend those applications with new technology. It's worth the time to take a look.

LANSA RAMP Webinars

If you haven't had a chance to see LANSA RAMP...do yourself a favor. The schedule follows:

An entirely different approach to application modernization and innovation. Going way beyond conventional refacing technologies that only provide presentation enhancements, RAMP is a set of technologies and a process that enables you to take your legacy iSeries applications – and without any reprogramming – turn them into a modern application in a way that’s never been seen before. RAMP addresses your immediate modernization needs as well as your long term strategy moving forward. (Be sure and tell them Rippe & Kingston recommends RAMP)


Technical Presentation

• May 3, 2006 1:00 p.m. USA CDT Register Now
• May 10, 2006 1:00 p.m. USA CDT Register Now
• May 17, 2006 1:00 p.m. USA CDT Register Now
• May 24, 2006 1:00 p.m. USA CDT Register Now
• May 31, 2006 1:00 p.m. USA CDT Register Now
  
  
  Executive Presentation
• May 11, 2006 1:00 p.m. USA CDT Register Now
• May 25, 2006 1:00 p.m. USA CDT Register Now

XSL: The power behind the LANSA WAM

LANSA has greatly enhanced the flexibility of their product with the introduction of WAMs. One of the best features is the use of weblets for interface design. Weblets are documents written in XSL that can be dragged and dropped into the design view for the page. The properties for the weblet can then be set so that it performs its desired function. This is a great concept because the documents can be copied, modified for specific use and saved as new weblets used for specific purposes.

As part of the R&D effort here at Rippe & Kingston we have been working to deliver WAMs through IBM Websphere Portal and other’s. Now that we’ve gained experience in using these documents to control style sheets, java script, and other page layout related issues; we are looking at improving on LANSA’s template (scripting) technology.

Standard buttons or clickable images can be customized and saved as new weblets with dedicated functionality. We are associating weblets with fields through LANSA’s “Visualization” feature. This allows you to include fields in templates that represent buttons. Once you run the template and compile the program, the customized buttons are already included on the page. This technique dramatically cuts development time for an application.

John Reuter Presents LANSA & Portals at Harris Data Conference

John Reuter will be a fetured speaker at HarrisData User Conference April 23-26, 2006 Sheraton Hotel — Brookfield, Wisconsin. John will present Portals & LANSA to the users.

IBM and Zend deliver PHP to the i5/OS

With the recent announcement of IBM and Zend delivering PHP to the i5/OS, it made me wonder if this will be a real competitor to LANSA. I know there are a lot of PHP programmers in the world (22 million) ....but will it be accepted on the iSeries? Let me know what you think.

research

take a look at this site:

 

Competiton to METHOS?  Hosted opportunity?, etc.

--
Sincerely,

Thomas W. Davidson

Don Nelson VP Customer Support for LANSA to speak at METHOS User Conference

Don Nelson, VP of Customer Support for LANSA will be speaking at the METHOS user conference on MAY 11th.

METHOS is a plant and facility maintenance software package that is 100% LANSA. If you would like to attend the conference or just listen to Don's presentation, please contact Mike Albers at 513-977-4548.

Postcards from COMMON

Ok, it is not a postcard. However, I thought you might like to see a couple of snapshots from COMMON. LANSA seems to be generating a lot of buzz around RAMP. How many people from LANSA can you identify? If you are one of the early adopters…let the rest of us know. Enjoy the photos. Thom

I thought I would share a quick update from COMMON regarding RAMP. It looks like LANSA might have another great success with this product based on response I have observed in their booth. If you haven't had a chance, go to their web site and you can actually walk through the process of using RAMP. It just might be the best thing you have done in a long time. I will try and take some picture and post them when I return. Back to the booth duty! Thom

LANSA Programmers/Consultants

LANSA Developers
If you are looking for LANSA developers with LANSA/AD, Visual LANSA 11, Web Access Modules (WAM), Web Services, LANSA For the Web, and iSeries as well as Wintel experience, you may want to contact us.

We own and sell several of our own packages as well as provide complete support and development for custom LANSA applications for our clients. We can work effectively on-site or remote. With today's technology, remote work is effective and affordable.

Our staff members understand LANSA's infrastructure and are seasoned professionals. If you need additional assistance for a short period or longer, give us a call at 513.241.1375 and ask for John Reuter. We will be glad to discuss our qualifications to fit your requirements. Visit our website for additional information and you can contact us from there as well.

WebSphere Portlet Generator for LANSA

LANSA Based Portlet Generator for WebSphere
We are presenting our new Portlet Generator for WebSphere at Common this week. Creating custom portlets has traditionally been difficult and required skilled J2EE developers capable of connecting to various data sources, business processes and existing systems. The e.ssential Portlet Generator and LANSA dramatically accelerate and simplify the entire process. Below is a sample WebSphere Portal screen with our LANSA Portlet Generator Portlets Embedded. Learn more, click here.

IBM iSeries Common

Rippe & Kingston is at the LANSA booth during the COMMON Conference being held this week at Minneapolis Convention Center. COMMON is the world's largest community of IBM iSeries (AS/400) users. We will be showing some of our work with LANSA's new product called RAMP and our LANSA Portlet- Generator.

We attended the press announcement of LANSA RAMP on Sunday March 26. Mr. Thom Davidson presented our experience as an ISV. So far we have seen many productivity gains including 5250 to graphical screen consolitation from 10 to 1 in some cases. See additional information at www.rippe.com

Service-Oriented Architecture

We are looking for someone that has taken on the challenge of migrating to a service-oriented architecture. I personally suffer from both excitement and fear of this new paradigm. It appears that this can solve our integration conundrum. I would love to chat with anyone that has applied SOA to their package. LANSA gives us the tools. I just don't want to cut off my fingers.

Renew your iSeries Applications

LANSA will be introducing a new product at common according to IT Jungle. This product will introduce an entirely different approach to application modernization and innovation. Visit them along with Rippe and Kingston Systems at Common on March 26th. If you want to register for information now on this new product, LANSA has provided a web site for on-line registration. We look forward to seeing you at Common.

COMMON Conference in Minneapolis

Rippe & Kingston will be in the LANSA booth during the COMMON Conference March 26-30, at Minneapolis Convention Center . I hope some of the readers of this blog will stop by and visit. In addition to hundreds of sessions on topics in business strategy, database, systems management, networking and development, the educational focus of the conference will be Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA. I am going to be showing some of our work with RAMP and our LANSA Portlet-Generator. See you in "Sunny Minneapolis". Thom

LANSA WAM Services

 

Rippe & Kingston Systems, Inc. provides WAM programming and systems development for Version 11 of LANSA.  Click here to visit our web site for additional information.

 

John Reuter

LANSA WAM Services

Rippe & Kingston can provide LANSA V11 WAM development and programming services. We have created several applications that use this technology. Click here to visit our site.

RAMP from LANSA just might be a Silver Bullet!

RAMP from LANSA just might be a Silver Bullet!

RAMP...Rippe & Kingston was first exposed to LANSA's concept back in late November 2005. Since then, we have seen this concept turn into a very exciting product. RAMP (Rapid Application Modernization Process) by LANSA is one of those rare modernizaton tools that can be used for tactical and immediate needs as well as a strategice foundation.

We have taken our green screen package (about 2000 screens which are a mix of LANSA and RPG) and now have most of the application running in a new framework, delivering client server and web browser solutions. THIS IS NOT SCREEN SCRAPING!

Our equipment module consolidated 32 screens into 1 with the amazing navigation capabilites and Windows like interface even in a browser. Our plans are to start transitioning over time the old programs into WAMS so that we will eventually be platform independent and the WAMS are automatically able to be plugged into a Portal with the LANSA Portlet Generator. And of course as most of you know, you can compile your WAM and have it be a web service (hot topic of the day).

I don't know if this is a "Silver Bullet" for LANSA, but it sure has impressed us. Anybody else have any experience with this new technology?

LANSA First Posting

I decide after working with LANSA since 1988 that I would like to share with others my experience from the past and where I see the technology going in the future. I am looking to discuss topics related to LANSA with other users of this technology. Let's Talk!