Ansvar, a leading ethical general insurance company specialising in insuring non-profit organisations, and Fortis Insurance in Eastleigh, part of the Fortis Group, have selected Profound Logic’s rapid web development system RPGsp supplied by Logicmate of London to run on their System i installations. Fortis Insurance operates a 570-7747 (P30/i400), which it’s had for a few months, while Ansvar has an 810-7406 (P10/i100).

RPG Smart Pages (RPGsp) is a rapid web development system for iSeries developers. The product is touted as “the easiest and fastest way” for RPG developers to create data-driven web applications, and claims to offer key advantages over traditional methods of getting iSeries information to the web. Entry-level cost for the product is £5,500.

With the RPGsp visual development environment, developers are claimed to be able to quickly create real-time web or graphical intranet applications by integrating iSeries data and RPG logic directly with HTML content. Since much of the development is wizard-driven, it is said that even non-programmers can build functioning web applications like data inquiries, file maintenances and web forms.

Ansvar chose RPGsp as its modernisation tool for web enabling existing iSeries applications and developing new applications. According to Mark Crowson, IT systems consultant at Ansvar: “We evaluated a number of alternative products and selected RPGsp as it gave us the best means of utilising our existing skills while moving towards new technologies. We knew of Profound Logic through using its online editor RPG-Alive and this same product forms part of the RPGsp integrated development environment. 

“We found the hands-on training in the use of RPGsp was excellent and were particularly impressed that every facility we asked for had already been built into the product. RPGsp comes across as a mature and fully-featured product. We will be working on a number of quotation applications initially then will be looking to redevelop some core applications.”

Fortis Insurance has also selected RPGsp to assist with its application development. Mark Tyrrell, project leader at Fortis, says: “We need to develop browser interfaces for internal applications and as part of extending our software services to suppliers. It’s important we become skilled at web/browser development and RPGsp forms part of our development road map. After an exhaustive evaluation process we selected RPGsp to enable us to rapidly develop web applications using our existing resources and allow us to iteratively modernise our current applications.

“We can use the RPGsp ‘on-the-fly’ web deployment options or the conversion wizards to provide immediate web deployment. RPGsp also offered us a means of addressing some of our longstanding application word processing issues. The Fortis iSeries staff was able to relate to, and work with, RPGsp without any retraining.”

Nigel Lothian, director of Logicmate, the EU distributor of RPGsp, says: “We are delighted Ansvar and Fortis have joined the international RPGsp customer base. When we first met with Profound Logic and looked at RPGsp we were impressed with the power of the product together with the ease of use of the integrated design environment. We have no doubt that experienced RPG developers will feel immediately comfortable with RPGsp and will be impressed by how quickly they can produce modern applications while maintaining all the strong characteristics of the System i they’re used to. The Profound Logic team has developed a first class product and provides excellent support. With the System i used as a web server, RPGsp applications enjoy the best of all worlds.”

There are many features to RPGsp, starting with the Advanced Visual Development Environment. It is possible to build functional applications in minutes utilising the product’s many wizards and templates. RPGsp provides built-in HTML design and code editing capabilities, and re-uses any RPG code (ie there are no proprietary languages to learn). The system supports both green screen and web development in one environment. There’s no need to employ WebSphere.

“RPGsp creates new or converts existing RPG programs to web applications,” says Lothian. “What’s more, there are no hardware upgrades to be handled, no middleware is involved, and no Microsoft servers are required.”

Frank Booty, industry reporter.