Dynasty Supports App Generation
For seven years, Dynasty Technologies (Redwood Shores, Calif.) supported mainframe, Unix then Windows NT application generation in its Dynasty Development Environment. But something was missing from Dynasty’s portfolio and the companies’ own customers let it know exactly what. They wanted to be able to use Dynasty to develop AS/400 applications.
Their entreaties did not fall on deaf ears. The Dynasty Development Environment can now be used to generate large-scale AS/400 e-business applications.
"A lot of [our customers] came to us and said the single best distributed system they’ve ever used is the AS/400," says Geoff Roach, VP of marketing at Dynasty Technologies. "Because of its system management capabilities, ease of use and the old cliché about how you can run it in a closet and forget about it, it’s so reliable, people tend to like it a lot."
Dynasty allows developers to build, assemble and manage distributed objects without coding entire applications by hand. Developers specify the objects to be used and Dynasty generates complete applications automatically in standard C code and relational SQL.
"Essentially what you can do with Dynasty is design an application independent of the platform and when the application’s finished, you say, here’s the target you want to run on," says Roach. "You design what the front end’s going to be and you can even split the application to run parts of it on different platforms. And you generate the communications software that allows the applications to work together."
Sandra Taylor, director of SPG Analysts Services (Natick, Mass.), says Dynasty is easy to use because of its component-based nature. "Dynasty’s claim to fame is that they deliver a number of pre-developed, pre-tested components to the high-end market," Taylor says. "The AS/400 has a devout, loyal following. The mean time between failures is practically eternity. They’re workhorses." She also says Dynasty will further integrate the AS/400 into the rest of the enterprise computing world.
According to Taylor, Dynasty’s porting to the AS/400 is essentially a way to integrate it into the enterprise level computing structure and join the rest of the distributed world. "From the Dynasty perspective, there’s not a lot of companies targeting the AS/400. They’re entering an area where there’s not a whole lot of competition."
Roach says Dynasty can also be adapted to integrate existing applications with the applications it creates. He says the company will focus on larger AS/400 organizations. "We generate high-level transaction processing applications. Now we support the AS/400. The perception is that it’s a growing market, especially outside the United States."
Hill Price Davison, a British financial services software development company, worked closely with Dynasty on the AS/400 implementation and now uses the product to develop AS/400 applications for invoice factoring/discounting and asset-based finance. Tony Davison, managing director of the firm, describes Dynasty’s AS/400 code generator as "efficient, robust and of high quality."
"The AS/400 generation capability is essential for us since the AS/400 is popular in our marketplace because if its ease of administration," he says. "Dynasty AS/400 generation allows us to develop software in a platform independent manner then target it for AS/400, our Unix targets -- HP-UX and AIX --, and NT."