LANSA Software Development Platform for System i and Windows
The hallmark of the LANSA software development platform for IBM System i (iSeries or AS/400) and Windows is business agility. Our business is built on enabling our customers to adapt to changes in their business with consummate ease – a claim supported by our twenty-year track record. We deliver enterprise-class power and functionality, normally the preserve of big business, in a simple and affordable toolset that can be used by everyone.
The LANSA software development platform is used by many small and medium sized companies to support their entire business systems infrastructure, and also by divisions of larger enterprises to run business critical applications.
LANSA's guiding principles
When designing our environment we followed these fundamental guiding principles:
- making people hard-code stuff that will change is not wise
- binding applications to one technology stack is too restrictive
- nobody has the luxury of starting with a clean slate anymore
- code that can change without tracking becomes impossible to maintain
- never define a function or rule more than once; reuse should be the norm
- don’t expect that one user interface style will suit everyone
Each of these principles is designed to avoid a trap; these are the same traps that have made legacy systems so rigid and cumbersome to maintain.
The four pillars of the LANSA software development platform
To avoid these traps and to make our promise of Advanced Software made Simple a reality, the LANSA platform is based on four key elements:
- a metadata repository
- a business-focused 4GL
- an independent data services layer
- a visual application framework
The LANSA platform significantly reduces costs over the entire Software Development Life Cycle, especially ongoing application maintenance, modernization and extension.
LANSA's Metadata Repository is the key
The only way to create a software development platform that would truly respond quickly and easily to change was to implement what we call a repository-based architecture. The LANSA software development platform is supplied with an integral meta data repository, unlike other software development environments that either have no equivalent or can only offer something as an after-thought. The repository is where you define metadata, which is the name given to the set of data that describes and gives information about other data. Storing definitions and rules in a central location – external from any code – dramatically shrinks the lifetime maintenance burden of a system and eliminates duplication.
