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.