Moving off U2

[Doug Averch]

Rocket has been trying since at least 2010 to get VAR's and clients to move off telnet to the web. See https://blog.rocketsoftware.com/multivalue/2020/07/modernize-your-existing-mv-app-with-a-native-android-ios-mobile-solution-leveraging-rocket-multivalue-integration-server-mvis-and-flutter-framework/. Wow, it has been at least 10 years and Rocket is still showing grand scale ineptitude. The reason some of us started using RedBack in the early 2000s was the Unidata/RedBack team built a full application. From that application, we could glean what pieces and parts it would take to get our application to the web. Your RedBack application showed us what the learning curve was and how much effort it would take companies like myself to move forward. Besides, none of these demos show any security which makes no sense to me in today's world.

 

1. All of your User Interface (UI) code in UniBasic will not be able to port in any way shape or form. If you are handling validation on a prompt by prompt basis the web does not easily support that. Your UniBasic routines must be re-written to support a way to get at the business logic for each prompt and any other validations, see number 3.
2. You need to move simple validations like date, numbers, email formats, phone formats, time, ranges, and such to the UI. After doing this your UniBasic code is considerably smaller and easy to debug.
3. All of your programs must support subroutine calls or function calls. The web cannot return data from standalone programs without scrapping the environment.
4. Prompts that check against other files to verify you have entered in a valid general ledger number or other valid code will need to be drop downs if they don't have too many values. If they have many values, they will need to be a lookup or popup.
5. Move your security code that may or may not be hardcoded in each UniBasic program to a profile like a page for users and groups to control access.
6. Create an API subroutine that handles standard functions like READV, WRITEV, READ, WRITE so that you do not have to write a separate call of each form to do these functions.
7. You will need to find a JavaScript library that handles the fundamentals of screening. Once you have learned this tool you can then create web forms for either workstation, pads, and mobile devices.
8. You will need to find a way to print reports since attached printers our not an option in today’s world.

U2logic has been doing Universe/Unidata development since the early 2000s. We created our own middleware called U2WebLink in 2005 that was more robust than RedBack. This allowed us not to be defined only by IIS on Microsoft Windows. We wrote our own IDE in 2004 that creates HTML/JavaScript code for the web. Our IDE was just modified this year for a different JavaScript library that is what we think more friendly to users and has a beautiful UI than the prior one we used. All of our UniBasic routines have been converted to be subroutines that generally only have business logic in them. We use BIRT for reporting since it can produce HTML, CSV, XLSX, DOCX, and PDF’s with users deciding which style is appropriate for them and relieving us programmers of multiple program versions.