LANSA (development environment)

LANSA is a development environment for generating applications on multiple computer systems. LANSA (http://www.lansa.com) offers an entire family of integrated software development tools. The main feature of the LANSA environment is the RDML language. It is classified as a 4GL (4th generation computing language). It originated on the IBM AS400 (iSeries or i5), but now runs on many systems including MS Windows, Unix, and Linux. In its first release in 1987, the RDML language was known as lambda.

RDML

RDML is an abbreviation for Rapid Development and Maintenance Language. RDML closely follows the syntax of IBM CL, or Control Language. CL is the "scripting language" equivalent of the OS/400 operating system. In recent years RDML has been extended to become RDMLX. This new version of the language has extra features, commands, types, and functions that are used in component development. RDML, on MS windows, integrates seamlessly with ActiveX.

RDMLX is a highly productive language using a centralised data dictionary called the LANSA Repository. Its most notable feature being it generates I/O modules for each file defined from the data dictionary. Every program that needs to reference a file therefore is guided through to the I/O module (OAM) for that file. This therefore is the ideal place to input validation logic including referential integrity on that file. Unfortunately, data integrity is handled only by the repository, so external changes made by other non-Lansa programs are not validated.

Other LANSA tools

LANSA Composer is a design and execution platform for integrating business activities involving transport and transformation of data and custom business processing. It satisfies the four key requirements of a Business Process Integration solution: 1. Transport – moving data between source and target. 2. Transformation – mapping data between many different formats. 3. Process Orchestration – sequential and conditional execution of process flow. 4. Administration – auditing, error-handling, logging, security and system operations.

LANSA Integrator (also known as JSM or Java Services Manager): This powerful product allows RDML programmers to use commonly used functions, mainly to exchange data. For example, the SQLService API allows for execution of SQL statements on many different database systems. The XMLQueueService API lets a developer quickly send and receive messages from iSeries Data Queues and MQSeries Message Queues. And, among dozens of others, the PDFDocumentService API service helps create PDF documents with bar codes, images, and text from XML data. The most powerful aspect of this product is that it uses simple commands in the same syntax as RDML. In addition, custom services developers need only implement a few java interfaces, and have the full power of the Java programming language at their disposal.

LANSA for the Web (also known as L4Web): This web development environment lets web developers create isolated, small web components (XHTML and Javascript) with inline server side RDML constructs that are evaluated at runtime to generate dynamic web pages.

LANSA Client: A reporting tool to query business data and create graphs. It is a query tool that works as a user interface to access and update data, and integrates Crystal Reports to enhance its reporting capabilities.

Visual LANSA: A Windows interface and event driven application providing a productive and user-friendly environment to knowledge workers. Companies who compare Visual LANSA with Visual Basic all comment that Visual LANSA is more productive and manageable during development and more stable and consistent to implement. Currently, Visual LANSA generates C code on the PC.

LANSA Portlet Generator: A Web interface that generates JSR168 Portlets. It provides drag and drop portlet layout for new and existing LANSA Web Application Modules (WAMS). It also provides theme management, portlet to portlet communication, external communication with portlets using web services and most programming languages including JAVA, LANSA, etc. Developed by Rippe & Kingston for the LANSA community.

Accelerator For Visual LANSA: An essential toolkit for any LANSA developer hoping to reach maximum productivity when creating Windows, Web and/or Web Service applications and interfaces. Envision Accelerator includes a cohesive collection of code generating wizards, components, and programs that, together, builds a more powerful development platform and impacts both programmer and end-user productivity.