The Porting Process
Expectation, Collaboration & Success
The technology that Dataline employs to port Gupta applications to Microsoft .NET is not a black box solution. We use the Ice Tea Group’s (ITG) Ice Porter migration tools because they do the best job of migrating Gupta application source code to C# or VB.NET. But while software porting tools are a key part of the methodology, the porting project process itself is a crucial element. Our porting process logically separates into distinct and well defined phases, each of which has a defined input and a verifiable output.
Since the output of each phase is used as the input for the next this approach makes it easier to manage a porting project, making progress measurable at any time.
The Five Phases
Dataline has simplified the process as much as possible. The technology and methodology of the process have both been tested and refined in the real world and proved to work. The process is transparent and Dataline is so confident of the outcome that we guarantee a successful outcome to any migration project.
Obviously, problems can arise in any porting project, but the key to solving them is having a technology that has the flexibility to accommodate them, and a process that detects problems as early as possible, thus reducing the overall risk.
Phase 1. Assessment
This is really a pre-project phase aimed at quantifying the effort, cost and timescale involved in a migration project for your applications. It consists of two steps and the first one is free!
Preliminary Analysis
The first step is a no-risk initial assessment which won’t cost you a penny – and we don’t need to get our hands on your code either at this stage. We’ll send you the PPJ Inventory tool which will run over your source folders and gather statistics about the application components and potential issues involved in porting your application to C#.NET or VB.NET. We will use this as the basis of a Preliminary Analysis report documenting our findings, identifying the main issues and providing you with an initial estimate of the cost and timescale for a migration project and a fixed price for a detailed project analysis. On the basis of this, you can then decide if you want to investigate a little further.
Detailed Analysis
If you like what you see in the Preliminary Analysis, you may want to proceed to the next stage. This involves a much more detailed analysis of your code and provides a proof of concept based on a trial port of your application as well as a fixed price project proposal. In this phase we will take a closer look at the findings of the PPJ Inventory tool and examine issues in your source code, under a mutual non-disclosure agreement. This phase involves considerable work for which a modest charge is made – generally £3k - £5k.
The PPJ Inventory tool generates a list of all known potential problems found in the source code (see the screenshot below). Each issue is carefully evaluated to assess whether it can be safely handled by the translation tool or needs to be addressed following the conversion to .NET. Some of these issues may indicate that the original SAL application requires modification in order to improve the quality of the generated output code.
The PPJ Inventory tool also generates a comprehensive inventory of all the libraries, dependencies, resources, external modules, and just about anything else that needs to be known in advance to correctly estimate the input necessary to complete the project (also see below).
During the Detailed Analysis the entire application is also translated to .NET using the Ice Porter translation tool to verify all the issues detected by the analyser. We will use 'quick porting' techniques to try to get your application (or part of it) running in the .NET environment, albeit with unsupported functionality removed. This proof of concept provides you with a clearer picture as to how the translated project will look and behave in Visual Studio & .NET.
The Detailed Analysis document will also specify exactly what commitment will be required from you and your development team in terms of preparing the code for translation and in testing the delivered project. At the end of this phase, we will meet with you to present our project proposal and answer any questions on your migration project.
