Understand Your Options

June 27, 2023

It’s easy to get romanced into lifting and shifting your application onto another database, but it is risky, expensive, and can take years. MV applications consist of code (essentially PICK BASIC) and an embedded database/platform that support a different data model than relational databases.

The difficulty of lifting and shifting is not just migrating data but, more importantly, the business rules/logic.

The way MV apps look often causes a business to start investigating options. But, before going to the extremes of ripping and replacing your MV applications, pause to consider recent developments with APIs and powerful new web technologies. Modern UI frameworks are community/ developer-driven tools that are open-source and free to use. This means these tools are constantly being improved and supported vs. proprietary frameworks by vendors that can come and go. Redesigning the interface using tools like Angular by Google or React by Facebook provides JavaScript libraries to quickly kick-start your modernization efforts while using Rocket® MVIS to talk to your proven back-end logic. Modernizing your current application will allow you to work with new, younger developers.

Focusing on the business logic layer, exposing it via normal RESTful layers, and communicating to an industry-standard UI transforms your MV application into a good citizen in any future modern application stack. It also allows current and prospective developers to understand each layer’s place and work with them more easily.

Young developers can increase productivity by using modern programming languages like Python, which is easy to use, efficient, and addresses skills gaps while optimizing the performance of your business application. In addition to being a top language that new developers learn in school, Python has the added benefit of allowing your BASIC developers to leverage the Python open-source library. Hundreds of thousands of solutions at your fingertips let you quickly add new features to improve your application (i.e., using a Python module to quickly enable sending SMS text messages from your MV app).

By utilizing APIs and today’s web frameworks, you will gain access to talent who can see themselves working in this forked development framework. This approach empowers you to use the best tool for the job based on its strengths while developers focus on what each part is doing.

Read the Rocket Software Business case for modernization whitepaper for a better understanding of today’s modernization options. Rocket Software can help you establish the path forward, no matter where you are on your modernization journey, for your application and business. The time has never been better to modernize.