Lansa Connector

The interface between LANSA and ARCAD-Deliver is intended for all companies that use the LANSA development environment. This concerns organizations that wish to further enhance their processes for structuring their application deployment and making it more secure, whether they are working inside or outside of the environment.

THE SOLUTION

The ARCAD LANSA Connectors allow you to manage LANSA changes from within the framework of the ARCAD-Deliver release management system. The Lansa definitions are transferred like any other IBM i components. ARCAD for LANSA has an interface level to flexibly meet to your needs in release management: The interface allows management of LANSA components and organizes them in a version with the ability to attach maintenance reports (relating LANSA tasks to ARCAD Maintenance reports is possible). (For Lansa interface in SCM context, see ARCAD-Skipper page).

To connect easily and consistently with LANSA, we integrated the concept of the ARCAD application/environment with the concept of the LANSA partition. For the concept of version/release, we used the elements of component extraction most commonly used by a LANSA developer, namely filtering by date of creation/modification and/or tasks if task monitoring is activated in the LANSA partition.

Check-in/check-out functions are applied on selected LANSA components to form a release. This allows conflict management to be accomplished well before the testing phase or final transfer to production. This feature provides librarians with good visibility and excellent conflict resolution tools.

Second, development is organized in a version; classic ARCAD release management processes apply, bringing integrity control/consistency of versions, traceability, and security from development until transfer to production. It should be noted that these processes are multi-technology. In fact, the LANSA release management team uses exactly the same process as classic/native or new technology teams.

THE ADVANTAGES

In ARCAD, the Lansa connectors were designed to work in the lower layers of the product’s core technology for a natural fit with existing procedures, and thus do not require multiple processes. The result is an interface that fits perfectly with LANSA standards and ARCAD procedures.

Specifically for the LANSA interface, ARCAD offers the choice between two interface models:

• Release management or
• Development change management

Keeping in both cases the actual mechanisms of configuration management,

• More transparent integration from an interface point of view,
• Repository visibility of components in different partitions.