Over the next several weeks we will be taking an in depth look into Profound Logic's newest product... Profound.js 2.0. We will be discussing the benefits, the different components as well as the easiest ways for you to access Profound.js 2.0 for your needs. Profound.js 2.0 enables you to easily adopt Node.js in your business, and to take advantage of the many benefits of Node, including access to a much larger pool of developers for IBM i and access to countless reusable open source code packages on NPM (Node Package Manager).
Lets take a deeper dive into the benefits of Profound.js 2.0 and how it can help modernize your legacy IBM i:
Develop, Integrate and Expose
The uses of Profound.js to a business can be a bit overwhelming and numerous, but the reality is that Profound.js has the solution to any of your current IBM i needs. With an environment for both rapid new development and modernization of existing legacy programs on your IBM i (formally AS/400 or iSeries)... Profound.js leads the pack in benefits for any of your companies needs.
It allows you to develop and find new developers to work on IBM i. Imagine this typical scenario…you have a 10,000 line monolithic green-screen RPG program that has screen logic and back end business logic all intermingled. The programmers that built it have long retired or moved on and no one fully understands the code. The customer has no way to access this data other than by running the green-screen application – in this state, it’s not Web-service accessible. In order to allow the program logic to be accessed as a Web service with the methods mentioned above, the RPG program would have to be deconstructed and modularized. But many of the newer developers have not studied RPG and would have a hard time with the deconstruction; thus leaving you with code that is forced to stay on the 5250 and not be accessed as a Web service.
2.0 also allows you to integrate with other non-IBM i systems (Java, .Net, PHP, etc.) to fully leverage time spent on building other systems. So now those RPG programs that were once difficult to integrate with other systems, now as Node.js they can be easily integrated at the drop of a hat.
On top of the integration abilities, Profound.js also makes it easy to expose Node.js programs that have direct access to RPG and DB2 as web services. It also makes it easy to expose IBM i data and program logic as an API, giving you easier access to the data within your code. Any application exposed and converted to Node.js through Profound.js can be run on any platform available. No matter what platform your applications run on, Profound.js 2.0 will work for you.
Open Source Access
The beauty of Profound.js is not only its flexibility and integration methods, but the access it gives you to the Open Source world. With Profound.js you can gain immediate access to all the Open Source packages available for Node.js. With Profound.js, these Open Source packages are easily callable from existing RPG, CL, etc. On Node Package Manager (NPM), there are close to a half million Open Source packages available right now! That is equivalent to getting half a million software licenses for free, whereas traditionally youd have to buy specialized software for IBM i to accomplish the same tasks. Some of the more popular software that is purchased for IBM i systems include:
- Web Service capability
- PDF/Excel generation
- IoT - Internet of Things
- JSON/XML processing/Web/Mobile Tools
- Watson API
- Access to data on other systems
- And much, much more...
The ability to draw from this seemly unending supply of software via NPM, can fill any companies needs, without breaking the bank. The Profound.js NPM Package is free as well!
Profound.js harnesses the power of Agile Modernization and Node.js for IBM i application modernization. Version 2.0 brings new capabilities to the product, including a commercial Connector module, new Framework and enhanced Converter module. These tools will be discussed next week when we dive deeper into the components of Profound.js 2.0.
Join our live Webinar on the power of Profound.js 2.0 on June 28th, at 10:30am PDT. We will be giving a step by step look through our newest product and be able to answer questions for you afterwards. Sign up today!
