Test Automation for SAP Packaged Applications

SAP Packaged Applications allow you to rapidly configure and customize business processes as your environment changes. To ensure the quality, performance and reliability of these applications, you need a sophisticated testing solution that can be configured and customized as quickly as your SAP landscape. In this article, we will show you how you can use your IBM® Rational® Functional Tester (RFT) toolset along with tools from IBM Ready-for-Rational partner, Arsin.

In this blog entry, I will discuss:

• A structured approach to SAP testing


• SAP current test automation paradigm and its challenges


• The need for a new solution for SAP test automation


• How Arsin Packaged Test Automation for SAP integrated with IBM Rational Functional Tester helps address these challenges

We will examine the functionality of Effecta Validation Engine, in conjunction with RFT, to collect the test requirements, define and build the test cases, build the test procedures, and execute and analyze the reports. Use of RFT and Arsin's tools enables you to greatly expand your test scope, significantly compress your test schedule, and reduce testing costs.


A Structured Approach to SAP Testing
SAP implementations pose some of the most intriguing and difficult challenges in the QA universe. The thickly netted system is extremely integrated and is typically linked to every business process in the enterprise. To tackle such an immense system, QA engineers must approach SAP applications with care.
With more than a decade of experience in testing SAP systems for a large client base in myriad industry verticals, we have developed a test maturity model assessment and improvement framework to bring about an organized and a structured approach to SAP testing. This framework has a three pronged approach, which offers process improvement, knowledge management, and test automation, as follows:

1. Process improvement. Process improvement deals with the assessment of the current Test Maturity Model and developing a plan to improve the Test Maturity Model to the next level and then implement it. A mature test process that has standardized templates, well-defined processes, clear protocols, and no bottlenecks provides for a complete and comprehensively tested SAP system. By comparing the current test maturity model with industry standards and identifying the gaps and focusing on them, test maturity can be improved.

2. Knowledge management. Knowledge management deals with institutionalizing QA knowledge collected over time. Traditional testing for SAP systems relies on the functional and technical consultants of the SAP system for subject matter expertise to deal with various instances. In this phase, test artifact libraries are built for critical business process for regression. The following test artifacts are documented:

• Test Requirements


• Test Cases


• Test Procedures

3. Test automation. After test artifacts have been documented in the regression library during the knowledge management phase, they are ready to be automated. However, before they are automated, these test artifacts are analyzed for feasibility of automation, the effort required for automation, the frequency of use of the business process, and the longevity of the business. With automation, execution components are developed using RFT, and Validation Components are configured using Arsin's Effecta Validation Engine to execute them automatically.

The remainder of this discussion focuses on the test automation aspect of the Structured SAP Testing Approach. Our belief is that RFT, in conjunction with Arsin's Effecta Validation Engine, makes SAP testing thorough, comprehensive, easy, and cost effective.


Importance of Test Automation in SAP Implementations
The SAP landscape is continuously changing, as a result of changes to SAP modules from SAP, business process changes within the client’s company, changes to the system environment, changes to applications interfacing with SAP, and a multitude of regulatory compliance mandates.

In order to keep up with these changes, SAP systems must be thoroughly tested. With every change, there is a regression library of test cases that needs to be executed to ensure stability. Each test requires time and effort when executed manually; by comparison, automated test take a very small fraction of the time and effort to execute. Automation also helps makes most of the test assets reusable.


Current SAP Testing Solutions and their Limitations
The existing SAP testing model on the market today makes a very rudimentary use of automation, in terms of:

Validation: In most cases, user interface (UI) tools that are available are used to automate test execution, which is only about 25% of the total testing effort. Validation represents more than 75% of this effort, and scrubbing the data using UI test automation tools is difficult. A certain level of validation is possible through UI based test automation tools, however it takes a long time to script this validation and any change requires a lot of coding following the first implementation.

Data management: Traditionally, data used for testing is captured and maintained in spreadsheets. Searching and sorting through this data is difficult, as is maintaining the consistency of data across users and locations. This difficulty is compounded by ever increasing volumes of test data to be maintained. In addition, there is no intelligent association between SAP metadata and its corresponding test data.

Managing change: Changes to SAP implementations occur during reconfiguration or the addition of custom-built components (programs). In these situations, the scripts for automated test execution need to be changed regularly, which is difficult. Moreover, when using UI tools for automation, 75% of the effort needs to be constantly re-worked to keep up with the changes to the SAP system.


Addressing these Limitations
The limitations above described call for a new solution that can address these issues. We offer a complete and scalable testing solution that combines Arsin Effecta Validation Engine with IBM Rational Functional Tester.

By automating the validation of data, business processes, custom development and integrations across SAP applications, you can increase the quality of implementation, support multiple changes in their environment and mitigate business risks. Also, by eliminating manual testing you can avoid greater difficulties in production that ultimately impact the quality and performance of the business. Arsin’s Effecta Test Suite provides the benefits of a complete testing solution by automating impact analyses of changes, test data maintenance, test execution and validation.

Figure 1: Arsin Effecta Solution Architecture for testing SAP applications

Test Data Manager
Stores test data along with criteria in the Effecta database. Before executing an automated test, validity of test data is checked on the target system and system is automatically updated. If the test data no longer exists in the target system or cannot be reused, the data set update feature will help to refresh with new valid data.

Script Manager
Automatically enhances recorded scripts and eliminates need for customization. Script manager enables script less automation of IBM Rational Functional Tester.

Change Impact Manager
When changes occur in a system, Change Impact Manager automatically extracts affected objects and identifies test cases to be executed for regression testing. It also identifies objects being changed that don’t have test cases in the library.

Report Manager
Report Manager provides out-of-the-box reports for tracking test artifacts, development and test execution. Detailed test results pinpoint failed events in test case.

Test Manager
Effecta promotes reusability and repeatability with the following features:
- Ability to create Test Requirements and link them to Test Cases and development objects
- Ability to create Test Cases and link them to Test Requirements for coverage analysis
- Ability to create separate Test execution steps in the form of Test Procedures and link them to Test cases
- Defect management
- Dashboard for reporting and metrics

Validation Manager for Middleware
Simulates inbound messages at various data interchange points and validates outbound messages.
Automatically validates translations and mappings

Validation Manager for Transactional Systems
Validation Manager for Transactional Systems is a completely configurable, customizable and readily deployable validation library of components for various business processes. It significantly accelerates validation by automatically extracting the actual data created by transactions and comparing it with expected results. The Validation Manager is specifically designed to support SAP systems.

Validation Manager for BI
Tests Business Intelligence systems during initial implementation and during maintenance and support pack deployments. It also automates the validation of data loaded from multiple ERP and other systems. Provides sophisticated reporting including detailed results.

Conclusion
The benefits of using automation in SAP testing are abundant. Test automation, deployed with minimal effort, enables increased test coverage, which in turn reduces cycle time and enables efficient bug detection early in the development cycle. Since test automation is designed for reusability, routine tasks are eliminated and total cost of ownership is reduced. Test automation is far more precise and consistent, and features standardized reporting, enabling clear test analysis across the QA environment.

Sarat Addanki is the Vice President, ERP Practice. He has 18 years of experience in the ERP arena including design, development and testing of ERP implementations. He was part of a SAP Quality professionals team contributing to the design of SAP Test Accelerator TAO. He founded the ERP Division at Arsin, which focuses on developing frameworks and accelerators to ensure delivery excellence, reduce the overall cost of ownership and increase productivity in ERP implementations. The Test Accelerators he designed significantly improve the testing process, knowledge management and test automation. His division focuses on providing quality services for SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Sterling, Retek and Middleware applications. His domain expertise ranges from Pharmaceutical Distribution, Hi-Tech, Manufacturing to Retail industries. He is a PMI (Project Management Institute) certified Project Management Professional (PMP). Sarat holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India.

Panther Applications in Croatia

Brief History
When the Prolifics application development toolset came to the Croatian market in 1990, independent software vendor company Pardus (then 4-MATE) chose it to develop a back office application for a large retailer. The character-mode JAM5 application was running on an Intel-based UNIX system, with 60+ concurrent users, the largest in the region at that time.

Based on the successful experience with the Prolifics toolset, Pardus developed another large integrated information system for retail banks. The platform was again character mode JAM5 on UNIX, with custom mechanisms for distributed database support. The system has since migrated to the recent version of Panther and is still in use today.

Pardus continued to use JAM and Panther for its own development, and started to distribute it to other Independent Software Venders (ISV) and end user organizations with their own IT staff. Programs for JAM and Panther training, consulting, project management, and end-user development team mentoring were created. This contributed to the rapid success of the tool in the Croatian market.

As a result, Panther is now used by the two largest banks in the country. One of them still uses the originally Pardus-developed software for its core data processing, supported by 70+ in-house Panther developers and a team of Pardus consultants. Other users, apart from ISV houses, include departments like the Croatian postal services, customs, health insurance, several ministries and Zagreb municipal administrations.

An Example: Forensic DNA Database
Pardus uses and encourages other fellow-developers to use Panther for a wide variety of applications. One interesting example is the Pardus-developed eQMS::DNA application, a DNA “fingerprint” database, now in use in Central Forensic Laboratories in two countries.

When the opportunity to develop such an application arrived, Pardus again chose Panther because of its excellent rapid prototyping abilities, flexibility of its scripting language and the versatility of its database transaction generator. Native XML import and export capabilities were an advantage.

The resulting eQMS::DNA application is a system primarily used for maintenance and efficient searching of database of human genotypes for forensic purposes (such as identification of biological traces like blood, hair, skin etc), but also has the capability to be used in fields such as livestock lineage tracking.

DNA fingerprinting relies on the fact that certain points in human (or other) genome (loci) change relatively quickly (display polymorphism) from generation to generation – fast enough to form a combination unique for an individual, but slowly enough to be stable within single individual's cells. The type of polymorphisms and number of loci used for constructing genotypes in eQMS::DNA is configurable, but typical installation will employ a standard set of 13 to 18 STR (short tandem repeat) loci.

The system maintains data on individual donors with optional end-user configurable personal and demographic data, multiple samples containing genetic material taken from the donor, and genotypes obtained from the samples, possibly using multiple techniques and identification kits. Both processed genotypes and optional additional data such as peak quality, confidence parameters and raw electroferograms can be kept. The system also keeps profiles of unidentified traces.

Manual entry of data to Panther screens, from plate gel electrophoresis is possible, but the typical data source results from automated capillary electrophoresis sequencers. Communication with systems such as Interpol DNA Gateway is also supported.

The searches can be performed interactively or in full automatic mode. All searches, including those using partial profiles and relaxed criteria are typically done in less than a second. The system also supports mixed-stain searches with provisions for common contaminant identification (such as genotypes of laboratory or other forensic personnel).

Interpol maintains a list of available DNA profiling systems (probably the most well known being FBI CODIS). eQMS::DNA is the only application from a commercial software developer.

Figure 1:Screen shot of eQMS::DNA profiling application

New Developments
Pardus has assisted many clients in modernizing their legacy character-mode JAM and Panther applications.

For example, a Complex Card Management application for a leading Croatian bank was recently ported from JAM5 character-mode to Panther5 GUI. Initial functionality was complete within a month, with an additional month spent adding capabilities made possible by the new version of the Panther tool.

Pardus mentored several of their customers as they transitioned from character-mode to GUI to the Web environment, and from 2-tier to multi-tier architecture. One example includes developing a Java wrapper to call mainframe-based Web services from within a 2-tier GUI and Web Panther application. Another customer, a public health institution, uses the similar Pardus-provided tool to provide their clients with controlled access to their LIMS software (also developed by Pardus) that contains data on analysis of food and water samples.

Despite the market focus shifting away from dedicated application development toolsets, Panther stays a viable product in the Croatian market, thanks to the high penetration and the level of experience and expertise available to its customers.

For more info see http://dna.pardus.hr/ and http://lims.pardus.hr/.

Dragi Raos is a co-founder of Pardus d.o.o a software development and IT consulting company from Zagreb, Croatia. Pardus is a distributor of Panther and JAM in Croatia. Dragi has three decades of experience in technical and scientific computing, design and development of complex financial applications and training and coaching of development teams, he has served as team leader or technical consultant with clients ranging from International Atomic Energy Agency to large regional banks to public health institutions. Dragi's technical expertise includes database management systems, middleware, CASE tools and a wide range of development environments, including 20 years of experience with Panther and all versions of JAM.

Learn About Security: Open Authorization in Federated Applications using IBM Security Tools

IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager (TFIM) simplifies application integration by providing single sign on between disparate web applications, so the users do not have to share their passwords or re-enter them. TFIM uses various protocols to achieve federation, which include SAML, WS-Federation, and OpenID. Our Security LoB has been invited by IBM to participate in a beta program to implement the popular authorization protocol, OAuth. OAuth, which stands for Open Authorization, is a protocol that allows users to approve applications to act on their behalf. OAuth makes it possible to exchange critical information across distinct organizations based upon a service level agreement that states one application as an OAuth client and the other as an OAuth provider. One major benefit of the OAuth protocol is its emphasis on authorization, when compared to its alternatives. This is giving rise to a hybrid model in which our customers can combine protocols like SAML or OpenID for authentication and OAuth for authorization. OAuth, besides making the token exchange mechanism transparent to the user, provides mechanisms to define the scope which the Client could access regarding the user’s data on the Provider.

Here is a fictitious example. Imagine PFAP as a financial application dashboard developed by Prolifics that provides a user with a consolidated view of his account balances across multiple banks. First, PFAP would have to be in an agreement as an OAuth client across all of the banks, from which account information would be obtained on behalf of the user. Once an agreement is set up with each Provider, PFAP would be registered as an OAuth client to those particular banks (Providers) and so would be provided with a client ID and a shared secret for each one. This information (Client ID, Shared Secret) would help the Provider determine, if the application (Client) requesting data on behalf of user, is one of its trusted OAuth clients. Assuming an agreement between Prolifics and a leading financial firm, PFAP is one of the OAuth clients that has access to the Firm's customer data, upon approval. The first time a user logs into the PFAP application, he will be asked to add his account number to PFAP. Once the user selects “Add Account” button, the user would be redirected to the Firm's website, where he would be asked to put in his credentials. At this step a token would be requested by PFAP from the Firm in the background, which gets authorized upon user logging into the Firm's website. This action grants access to PFAP to act on the user’s behalf.

From the user’s perspective, once logged in the Firm would display a “Consent to Authorize” page where the user would needs to permit access to PFAP to act on his behalf and retrieve information within a certain scope, which in this case would be user’s account balance. Once the user agrees to permit PFAP to act on his behalf and retrieve balance information, a verifier code is sent to PFAP in the background. PFAP would then request an access token from the Firm's application sending the verifier code, Client ID, Shared Secret and few other parameters to request an Access token. The Firm would verify the Client ID and Shared Secret to determine if PFAP is one of its OAuth clients and then would verify the Verifier Code to generate an Access token. Once PFAP receives the Access token, it enables PFAP to get the user’s data on his behalf though within a permitted scope, which in this case would be the account balance. So next time the user logs in, since PFAP would already have an Access token, the user would be able to see his balance information without having to login to the Firm's website. Now, implementation of hybrid models is being thought upon, where a combination of OAuth with protocols like SAML or OpenID would help us achieve SSO at the same time. For instance, once logged into PFAP, an implementation of hybrid model would enable the user to perform other operations in the Firm's website like balance transfers, by launching a new link to the Firm without the need to login again (SSO).

BPM Best Practices for the Financial Industry

In our current economic environment, the financial industry is challenged today by two very significant needs to improve efficiency and enhance service. I spoke about these business needs last year at an event hosted by Prolifics and IBM, and they couldn’t be more significant today. To satisfy these requirements, organizations are tasked with driving down costs by consolidating duplicated and siloed systems into well-defined, reusable services and managing customer service levels with greater flexibility.

This industry has a collection of 'habits,' or best practices, that have a powerful effect on business performance in these critical areas. Over time, we have captured the best practices that have proven to be successful with process management programs within the financial industry. At this seminar, we reviewed 11 specific practices that help financial services organizations experience success with projects/delivery, team competency and leveraging Business Process Management (BPM) across the enterprise.

I’d like to share some of these ‘habits’ with you now:

Make BPM about Productivity and Visibility

• Metrics, KPIs and SLAs should be part of the DEFINE phase
• Don’t scope out metrics
• Remember: visibility is critical to improvement

Never “One and Done”

• Iterative Approach: continuous process improvement
• Additional phases or versions will always happen: The value in BPM is that you can get your first version out there quickly, but the real opportunity here is really in version 2, 3 and 4 where you are bringing entirely new levels of capability and sophistication of efficiency of effectiveness to your organization

Don’t Skip Process Analysis

• Processes are done by many different parties! Process analysis helps you understand: What does the end-to-end look like? What data is needed at different points? What is the velocity that we need in this process? How quickly do we need turnaround time?
• Process analysis sets apart traditional applications development from building process applications

  
Build a Complete Team

• Have the right mix of resources on the team with a broad set of skill sets
• Java (.NET) developers aren’t all you need

Establish the Owners

• A requirement for succeeding with BPM is that processes must be business-owned. You need people from the business to engage and determine what the process priorities are.
• They key benefit to this iterative approach is that you can make tradeoffs and changes to adapt to changing business conditions and requirements. A level of business engagement will ensure that the right decisions are being made.

In addition, financial institutions face a highly demanding environment requiring exceeding agility. The seminar focused on how customers can reap the benefits of the business rule approach to operational decision making in the areas of payments, credit and lending, risk management and customer care for financial institutions. With business rules, key decisions in your financial processes can be changed in minutes to days rather than months - bringing new levels of efficiency to day-to-day operations.

To read more about these 11 Habits for highly successful BPM programs and the benefits of a business rules management system, please take a look at this presentation. For any questions about these topics or Prolifics’ solutions for the financial industry, please email solutions@prolifics.com.

Don Rivera is a Client Executive with Prolifics managing the NY & NJ Metro territory. Don is a certified IBM WebSphere Solution Sales Professional working with SMB and Enterprise accounts to determine how to leverage IBM software technology to meet their critical business objectives. He brings over 16 years of experience working in the information technology industry in various system engineering, sales and business development roles with companies such as Computer Sciences Corporation, Level 3 Communications and BBN Technologies.

Leveraging your Panther Assets with Web Services

Software applications have become a valuable component of modern enterprises. They contain critical business knowledge, and represent significant design and development effort. It only makes sense to extract as much value from these applications as possible. As enterprises grow and merge, the need to share the information in these applications becomes imperative. This applies to your Panther applications we well. For example, order entry systems need to talk to billing systems, shipping systems, and so on.

While there are many methods for accessing your Panther applications, Web Services provides a common method, across diverse platforms, products, and computer languages, in a well-defined manner. As long as each application implements the Web Services standards, applications can freely interoperate with each other. This bi-directional communication is independent of the technology that the target application was written in.

Your Panther applications can participate in this inter-application communication by implementing Web Services, multiplying the value within them. In this way, systems throughout your enterprise, or beyond, can benefit from the existing code and data within your Panther applications.

You can also utilize your Panther tools and skills to create new RAPID Database Transactional Web Services for just about any application. This is totally independent from your existing Panther applications and utilizes the same rapid development platform.

For a complimentary Discovery Call, please call your Business Development Manager at 1 (800) 458-3313 ext 2 or email crm@prolifics.com.

Prolifics BPM Methodology - 5 Steps to Improve Your Process and Build Your Evidence-Based Business Case

Business process improvement is a systematic approach that helps organizations become more efficient by optimizing their core business processes to increase productivity and reduce cost; business process improvement initiatives have emerged to become essential drivers for organizations to compete in a rapidly and unpredictably changing market. According to a Gartner EXP Survey, improving business processes has been one of the top 5 business priorities for the past 5 consecutive years.

The business process improvement approach is a series of actions taken by a process owner to improve a business process to meet a new goal defined by the organization. Those actions have to follow a methodology or a framework in order to create successful improvement results.

Any process improvement methodology consists of 3 macro level steps that occur in the following order:

In this white paper, I will present Prolifics' methodology for process improvement. The methodology is designed to address those fundamental challenges with traditional process improvement approaches; it also provides a simple road map for process improvement that is powered by innovative technologies that will guide you step by step in your process improvement journey and expedite the process improvement cycle. This methodology is presented in the context of a real customer initiative to improve a core business process.

To read this white paper, click here.

Hanna Aljaliss is a Solution Architect in the BPM & Connectivity practice at Prolifics. He has over 7 years of consulting experience in the IT field - 5 of those were focused on IBM Business Process Management and SOA implementations. He has led several major enterprise initiatives across different industries from the conceptual stage to the live solution stage. Hanna holds a Master degree in computer engineering from Stevens Tech and has been a frequent presenter at the IBM's Premier Conference for Business and IT Leaders (IMPACT).

Converting your Legacy JAM Application into a Panther Web Application

Converting a legacy JAM/Panther 2-tier application into a Panther Web Application offers a significant advantage: a conversion allows reusing a significant portion of the existing code as most JPL and C functions continue to be fully functional.

Although straightforward, the conversion process is not trivial or automatic. The conversion process does present some challenges and involves making changes and additions to the existing code.

In this document, I start by quickly describing some key differences between a JAM/Panther 2-tier application running on a GUI environment and a Panther application running on the web. Then, I proceed to discuss aspects of the application that are reviewed during the process of converting a GUI application to the web.

Key differences between a GUI application and a Web application
In a GUI environment, when a JAM/Panther application is executed, it runs on a dedicated process that performs several tasks for the application: this one process makes the calls required to display the screens and widgets to the user, handles the screen event cycle and maintains the application state. In this same process, all the screens and JPL code are loaded and executed. This process, also, connects to the backend, which is typically a database that is accessed through the Panther DBi.

When an application is executed on the web, the architecture is quite different. For starters, instead of having one process perform virtually all the tasks required for the application to work, several processes (residing in different hosts) are involved in performing the tasks required for an application to run on the web.

On the web, the browser is the only program running on the client computer. It allows the user to interact with the web pages dynamically generated on the server. Once a given page is displayed to the user, there is no interaction with the server until the user performs an action that results in submitting a request to the server. More specifically, as the user interacts with a page in the browser, several events are generated and they can be divided into two groups: events that are handled locally by the browser alone (for example, when the user tabs between the fields in the page) and events that require server processing (for example, when the user clicks on a push button to perform a search in the database).

When an event in this second group occurs, the browser submits a request to the HTTP server. The request is then passed along to an available Panther Web Application process, which executes the appropriate Panther code and replies with a new rendition of the screen in the form of a new HTML page. This HTML code is then transmitted back to the browser and displayed to the user.

This is perhaps the root cause of most of the changes required for converting an application to the web: whereas in a GUI environment, a single process continually handles the screen event cycle, executes the appropriate Panther code and displays the application screens using the platform’s native API. On the web, these operations are split between the browser (which renders the HTML code it receives and maintains its own event cycle as the user interacts with it) and the Panther Web Application processes residing on the server (which receive requests from the clients, execute the appropriate Panther code, and reply with HTML code that is sent back to the browser).

The Panther Web Application processes that actually execute the Panther code are a pool of processes called Jservers. Each of these Jserver processes handles one request at a time, and generates a response. Being stateless processes, the Jservers retain no memory of previous transmissions: as soon as a Jserver process has produced the reply for a request, it again becomes available to process more requests, which may come from the same user session or, in most cases, from an altogether different user session. Using stateless processes is a common practice for web applications because they allow excellent scalability: a small number of stateless processes can handle requests coming from a large number of users.

Maintaining the Application state
So, if the Jservers are stateless processes: how is the application state maintained for each user session on the web? The short answer is: by caching data.

Panther Web automatically caches application state data, such as the values of hidden widgets, scroll state of widgets, and bundles.

Two modes of caching data are supported: embedding the cached data in the generated HTML code, or keeping the cached data on the server and embedding just a reference to the cached data in the generated HTML code.

Panther Web also provides functions to define and use context global variables from JPL code. Such variables are set by a specific user session and remain private to that user session.

Functions to store and retrieve data in HTTP cookies are also provided.

HTML Generation
As described previously, the application screens are dynamically rendered as HTML code to be presented on the browser. Panther automatically generates the HTML code for the screens and the widgets in them.

The HTML generated by Panther may need to be customized, mainly for 2 reasons: to fine-tune the visual appearance of the screen on the web and to integrate JavaScript code.

Using the Panther editor, the name of a pre-existing HTML document can be specified in the HTML-template property of a screen thereby providing the structure of the HTML generated for the screen. This allows you the flexibility to determine how the HTML for the screen is generated. The provided HTML template is tied to the Panther backend by embedding Panther-provided tags into it, thus specifying the exact location where the HTML code for the dynamic elements are to be included in the resulting HTML page.

Custom HTML properties can also be set for the individual widgets on a screen. These properties allow making additions or changes to the HTML attributes within the INPUT element that Panther generates for a widget.

These properties can also be used to hook in JavaScript functions and JavaScript libraries such as Dojo and jQuery.

To give you an example of the kind of things that can be done by customizing the HTML generation, see the screen shot of an application screen in the Panther editor.

By including the code shown below in the screen JPL, the attribute property of the Single Line Text widget called “i_odate” is modified before Panther generates the HTML for the screen:

When the screen is displayed in the browser, see how the widget is no longer displayed just as an input field, but as a Dojox calendar widget.

Navigation
GUI applications typically have menu bars that allow the user to navigate between screens. On the web, there is no natural replacement for menu bars and many alternatives are available for providing navigation controls on the web. During the conversion, it is necessary to select the one that better suits your needs.

Web Event Handling
You can provide JPL procedures with the names listed below, and those procedures get executed as events occur in a web application:
web_startup – This procedure is called when a Jserver process is started. The code to open the connection to the database is typically invoked from this JPL function and the database connection is maintained through the whole life of the Jserver process. This procedure can also be used to load public procedures and data used through the application, specify database error handlers, and define global variables.
web_enter – Each screen can have its own implementation of this procedure. It gets called after the screen entry event and before the web browser data is loaded into the Panther screen structure. This is only called once on each request submitted.
web_exit – Each screen can also have its own implementation of this procedure. This is invoked after all other events have been processed and immediately before Panther dynamically generates the HTML output for the request being processed.
web_shutdown – This procedure is invoked when the Jserver process is shutting down. This is where any required application clean up is typically invoked, including the code to close database connections.

Conclusion
Several approaches need to be evaluated when facing the prospect of making an existing Panther GUI application available on the Internet or an intranet.
This document has provided you with a glimpse of the differences between the two environments and has presented aspects of the application that need to be addressed during a conversion. Hopefully this information has piqued your interest about converting GUI applications to the web in general and the Panther Web product in particular.

Eduardo Ramos is a Project Manager at Prolifics. He has over 16 years of experience in the IT field, specializing in the development and migration of multi-tier applications using various technologies including Panther and the IBM WebSphere family of products.