Moving to Client/Server

More and more companies are discovering the many benefits of moving their systems to a distributed client/server environment. But getting there is not easy. You need to move your existing systems into this new environment as quickly as possible - and with minimal interruption to yourcompany's business operations.

UNIF/X has extensive experience helping companies complete large-scale system migrations. We have developed proprietary rapid migration methods and tools which enable us to automatically and simultaneously convert data and applications - saving customers millions on their "downsizing" and "rightsizing" projects.

Case Study

The following describes an example of a system migration project completed for a major Wall Street Financial Publisher.

The scope of the project was to migrate the company's data processing department (over 500,000 lines of code) from a mainframe system to a distributed client/server environment using UNIX, Sybase, and C++. The project was successfully completed in less than four months - 25% of the time that the client had originally estimated to complete the job.

The existing applications were running on IBM mainframes using a 4GL-like language called NOMAD. Since NOMAD is a functional language consisting of high level constructs such as LIST, WRITE, DEFINE, SELECT, STRING MANIPULATIONS, and CONTROL STATEMENTS, C++ was chosen as the target language. C++ can simulate these constructs (which do not exist in a procedural language such as C), even where the functional language's semantics change dynamically in run time.

After carefully mapping the data, our people developed a unique compiler to accept NOMAD files and produce C++ programs that interface with and manipulate SQL in Sybase. This incorporated a specially developed parser to relate the very different syntactic and semantic operations of the languages, and an object library to implement the NOMAD constructs. The parser called the object library and applied sophisticated techniques to convert the hierarchical database structure of NOMAD to the resulting relational database structure of Sybase.

The project was completed on time, saving the customer over $5 Million.

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