Informix 4GL to ASP.NET, Egypt

Customer

The Egyptian office of one of the world’s biggest insurance organizations. The organization operates in the market of property casualty insurance, life insurance and retirement services, and has around 90 million customers around the globe.

Challenge

The customer decided to modernize one of their production systems by moving the Informix 4GL desktop application to a web one. Thanks to this solution, there will be no need to install the application on local machines, it will become easy and convenient, and therefore the customer chose it.

The main problem of this transition is the difference in behavior of desktop and web applications. For example, desktop applications have hotkeys, and some controls can be moved using the arrows, while in web applications this behavior is not implemented by default.

Solution

Usually, Ispirer Systems launches application conversion projects from a Proof-of-Concept stage to prove that the Ispirer migration solution meets the challenge.

During the Analysis Stage, the Ispirer team have suggested choosing ASP.NET Web Forms as preferred design pattern for the purposes of migration automation and code maintenance. User interface conversion was developed from scratch and implemented in the project.

During the PoC Stage, Ispirer converted about 13,000 lines of code to ASP.NET and extended Ispirer Toolkit. Moreover, thanks to the new conversion rules, the toolkit was able to migrate Informix 4GL *.per files into ASP.NET *.aspx files. In addition, the conversion of Informix 4GL statements that work with databases (such as queries or cursors) was significantly developed.

Benefits Derived from Conversion

After completing the PoC, the Ispirer team has delivered to the company a new ASP.NET application with the same functionality as the provided Informix 4GL one, but implemented in a web architecture.

Thanks to the PoC, it was possible to prove that the Ispirer application migration solution is optimal for such conversion projects, since Ispirer Toolkit wide capabilities allow to achieve successful results in the shortest possible time, and the provided application is ready for further development and maintenance.