Data processing: software development – installation – and managem – Software program development tool – Translation of code
Reexamination Certificate
1999-08-30
2001-03-27
Chaki, Kakali (Department: 2122)
Data processing: software development, installation, and managem
Software program development tool
Translation of code
C717S152000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06209124
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Legacy system computer applications that have been executing on mainframe computers, in some cases, for decades, continue to play a vital role in American commerce, education, and industry. Such software, in fact, has vastly outlived the time period during which its creators believed it would be useful. Doubts about the truth of the foregoing proposition vanish in the face of the billions of dollars that have been (or will be) spent by U.S. companies and the United States government in correcting computer code that is not Year 2000 compliant. The vast bulk of this code is substantially more than five years old.
Added to this vast mass of legacy systems are modern systems executing in modern environments, such as the client/server environment. These systems, like the legacy systems, suffer from the same basic limitation—the business logic and associated data are locked up in architecture-specific systems. Those using different operating systems running on computers powered by entirely different central processing units cannot effectively access the data and business logic residing on these conventional systems.
These conventional systems (both the legacy systems and the more modern systems) are not only important, they also represent substantial investments by companies. They are the product of billions of dollars of programmer compensation and untold millions of hours of business planning, strategic design, and work flow description. In many respects, the code embodied in these conventional systems describes the operations of everyday commerce in this country.
Today's technology culture differs widely from the environment that existed when most of these conventional systems were created. Access to computers is no longer limited to an elite handful of technicians with dedicated terminals hooked to gargantuan boxes located in specially cooled rooms. Today, virtually every worker has a personal computer sitting on his/her desk. Others, on the go, carry their computers in brief cases that connect to the home office via telephone lines. Consumers, from their dens and living rooms, are buying and selling stocks, checking their bank accounts, and (in some cases) telecommuting. The need to get the data and business logic out of the hands of the specially trained technicians and into the hands of every day people is great. The demand is the same, and the problem is the same, whether the important data and business logic resides on a legacy system or on a modern client/server system. Accessing and interacting with it from the outside, an external system, is a huge chore.
The demand is great, but, even more importantly, it is growing exponentially—with the explosion in popularity of the Internet and, especially, the World Wide Web. The number of trademark applications alone with terms like “e-biz,” “e-business,” “e-commerce,” and the like is staggering. Clearly, commerce has moved to the net. Virtually no television advertisement and certainly no television news program fails to include a reference to its Internet or World Wide Web address.
Coupled with the popularity of the Internet has been another trend that has silently but markedly transformed the landscape of commerce and, indeed, everyday life in the United States. This is the trend toward self-service. Full service filling stations, for example, have almost been relegated to a dim memory. ATM machines have replaced tellers, and even some banks charge an extra transaction fee for using a human teller, as opposed to an ATM machine. The Internet itself is the ultimate expression of the trend toward self-service. Banking, book buying, car and home shopping, teaching, and even church services are available when the cyber-consumer wants it and without the presence of any human tellers, brokers, clerks, teachers, professors, registrars, or ministers.
Regardless of the computer system on which the application is running, the same basic disability exists. The data and business logic are locked up in an architecture-specific format. Almost universally, raw data is stored in a format shaped primarily by storage constraints, e.g., in relational database tables, and by retrieval considerations, e.g., indexes. This data is presented in business-useful human-friendly form only when acted upon by the architecture-specific computer application that carry out instructions based on business logic. In other words, the data resides in one generally useless format and is put in useful form only when acted upon by a separate computer application, which application is typically architecture-specific in terms of its functionality. Thus, whether the information and business logic are locked up inside a venerable legacy system or are stored in client/server systems in database tables, systems on the outside have difficulty in reaching into these conventional systems for not just the raw data, but the data in a form and format that has been filtered, selected, organized, and processed by intelligence that embodies an organization's business logic.
The problem, as noted above, is not just converting the data from one system to another. Difficult as that problem is, converting the raw data from a format on one magnetic medium to a different format on another medium has been done before. As noted above, however, conversion of the data does not solve the problem. The business logic that sorts, parses, selects, combines, performs operations upon, and presents this data in useful form is left behind. The raw data, even if converted, is just sitting there. It is no longer part of the system. It is just plain data.
In order to make this data, even after it is converted into a form that can be processed by an external system, of any use, it has to be combined with the business logic, e.g., combined with computer code that sorts, parses, selects, combines, presents, and otherwise operates on the data in ways that are meaningful to the business or institution that owns the data. That business logic already exists in the executable code still residing on the conventional system. The business logic needs to be duplicated or replicated in a form that the external system can use.
The process of reinventing the business logic is inefficient, time-consuming, and (in many cases) ineffective. It is inherently inefficient to operate two parallel systems—the conventional system and the external system. The conventional system represents a huge investment of time and money—an investment likely to have painfully escalated with the cost of making these conventional systems Year 2000 compliant. Reinventing these programs in another environment—the environment of the external system—hardly makes sense now. Moreover, the programmers who best know the organization's business logic, as it is embodied in the programs executing on the conventional system, are probably not the people who are best equipped to recreate the business logic in the new (external) environment. Almost by definition, they are trained on and have developed expertise in the environment of the conventional system, not the external system. Thus, if the business logic is to be recreated on the external system, those with the best knowledge of the business logic will need to be retrained in the language of the external system or, in the alternative, the job of recreating the business logic in the external system will be handled by those with no experience in the organization's business logic. Both approaches fall far short of the ideal.
An alternative to the solution described above—translation of the data and recreation of the business logic—would be to graft external system awareness into the conventional system. This approach is best illustrated by the efforts of some to transplant HTML-aware routines, libraries, and tools into legacy systems. Modern flavors of RPG, COBOL, Fortran, and others sport new web awareness tools and extensions. This approach has both advantages and disadvantages.
The main advantage of this approach is that it allows the legacy system programm
Murphy Gary L.
Vermeire Dean R.
Chaki Kakali
Spencer Fane Britt & Browne LLP
TouchNet Information Systems, Inc.
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