I have been working on few opportunites on Gupta to .Net migration. In most of the cases the client was thinking on a complete rewrite from Gupta to .Net 2.0.
During my research on vendors who can provide tools/ Services for the gupta code migration to .Net, i can across a vendor known as Ice Teagroup, which has tools and expertise in the code migration.
ITG provides licensing of the tool as well as services for various phases during the migration project life cycle.
ITG has a tool known as PPJ inventory analyser which helps in the analysis of the exisintg Gupta application.
PPJ Inventory will open your top level applications and all included libraries and collect the following information:
· number of items
· included libraries
· included dynalibs
· external functions
· images and bitmaps
PPJ Inventory will also add warnings if certain items of the SAL language are used which are known to generate more or less manual interaction or cannot be ported at all.
This tool needs an Gupta runtime for the tool to run. The tool has an very intutive GUI which requires the gupta code as an input for the report to be generated. The report generated will be in a XML format.
The translation process is straighforward and quite flexible.
Ice Porter™ loads the source SAL application using the CDK, parses all expressions into expression trees, loads and binds all known assemblies (including modules that have already been ported and custom plugins), analyzes all references and relationships, re-generates the application into a CodeDOM structure (XML-Like Code Document Object Model), optimizes the resulting structures, and finally feeds the final CodeDOM to code renderers that generate the final source code in reliable and consistent manner.
Throughout the entire process, the tool generates special events that can be handled by custom-developed translation filters.Translation filters can modify and enhance the translation process at every step.
Our translation technology can be adapted virtually to any requirement.Migration Support Library
The migration support library is called PPJ Framework™.
All migration solutions have a support library. Some may be better or more extensive than others, but all automated,semi-automated, or manual conversion approaches have one. (If someone from marketing tells you otherwise, don't believe them).
Our library is entirely written in C# and it directly extends native types and native controls.
The only third party component that we use is the FlexGrid .NET, for which we have obtained a OEM license. The database layer in the PPJ Framework is entirely based on ADO.NET and can use any ADO.NET compliant driver.Our library is as thin and modular as possible. The Visual Toolchest implementation is in a separate module, the XSal2 implementation is also in a separate module, and so is the M!Table implementation and the reporting engine. This approach allows you to deploy only the modules that are needed by the project.
You also get the full C# source code for free, as part of the maintenance agreement.
Customizations
Using some of the unique Translation Filters technology, we can add any kind of additional processing logic to the translation of the Gupta code and the generation of the new .NET code.
In addition to our standard customizable filters, we can custom develop personalized rules to normalize the UI of the application, extract documentation in a specific format, generate ad-hoc wrappers to fit in a SOA architecure, change the naming convention, and much more. There is almost no limit to what we can do.
Customers can also develop their own translation filters directly in C# or VB.NET.
The cost of the tool is very competative and the services offered are cheaper and are right fit for a automated code migration to .Net technology
