The New Infrastructure for Legacy Applications

ere at BASIS, we have been working feverishly for the past couple of years to develop our newest product, BBj™. With BBj, we are able to execute 15-year old program code in a Web browser. So what? The simple, short answer is, infrastructure.

Our current GUI product, Visual PRO/5®, is an extremely powerful tool for developing graphical applications. With our 64-bit highly recoverable file structure, there is virtually no limit to the amount of data you can collect …and recover. To deliver all of that to a distributed computing environment with browser access requires a whole new foundation.

The short route to that delivery would have been to start over, writing new tools in a new language. That might have made sense if our current products were not as powerful and feature-rich as they are. It might have made sense if there were not thousands of applications written in our current product. And it might have made sense if we were a start-up company. But the BBx® baby happens to have priceless bathwater, and BASIS is going to extremes to deliver a more contemporary foundation for these existing feature-rich applications. Our goal is to retain all the power and application logic that inspired these thousands of BBx applications while implementing a new infrastructure that allows them to be competitive in all markets, not just the business accounting realm.

This magazine is focused on Web development and distributed computing. For some BASIS Customers, this is e-commerce. For others, it is managing inventories and supplier relationships over the Internet. For others still, it is augmenting their businesses with new service products, such as ASP (application service provider) offerings. Today, we facilitate Web accessibility via sockets, ODBC, JDBC and the Basic Web Utility. BBj adds thin client and brings it all together to deliver the most powerful, and versatile, set of tools in the Business Basic world and elsewhere. Everything we are designing, and will design, will revolve around the BBj infrastructure. This design eliminates all of the growth limitations found in legacy Business Basics. Your files can grow and reside wherever you need them. Your application can be accessed by any desktop tool from dumb terminals to X-terminals to browsers to palmtops.

Want to see the power of BBj for yourself right now? The demonstration applications on this issue's CD are written in Visual PRO/5. The CD runs on our current version of Visual PRO/5. Use the included installation program to put the BBj Technology Preview on your hard disk drive and run the same applications in BBj. Watch how these Visual PRO/5 applications work in the same way in BBj. Furthermore, we have added a couple of Web applications you can run right on your PC from your desktop browser. Lastly, I want to encourage you to keep an eye on our Web site, www.basis.com. We are on the move here at BASIS, and we want you to come with us!!!

Greg Grisham,

Technical Product Manager