FilePro

The burden of legacy code

You may have a business-critical system implemented with a tool called "FilePro." FilePro is a 4GL system designed to make it easy to write systems to support business functions. These systems have probably been solid, reliable performers for you for years. What you may be finding, however, is that it is getting harder and harder to find people who know the tool and can maintain or extend your systems.

There is another issue too. FilePro is a tool that takes an "old" approach to data, screens, and reports. It is a closed and proprietary system. It continues to be developed and maintained, and extensions to support web interfaces and so on have been added. But fundamentally, the architecture of software systems have moved on from the model FilePro follows.

All of this said, we do not suggest that people abandon their FilePro systems. The company that maintains FilePro is still in business. If you have the staff to maintain what you have, or if your system is stable and needs no expansion or extension, there may be no reason to move away from the platform.

Moving to the New Without Breaking The Bank

You may, however, be finding that you need to expand or extend your system. You may want to integrate it with other systems. You may simply want to be able to start developing using languages like Java, C, C++, PHP, perl, or many others. You may have standard tools for SQL databases that you would like to use against your extensive collection of FilePro data.

One option, of course, is to use fp Technologies' own FilePro ODBC product, which will let you make SQL queries against your FilePro data directly.

The approach we follow, however, is complete conversion.

TechnoDane Software & Systems, LLC is developing a battery of tools to help them automate the conversion of entire FilePro applications to a modern so-called LAMP platform and we plan to release much of the code we develop for this purpose as open source.

The first of these tools is a perl module which we plan to release to CPAN called FilePro::Data. Don't let the "0.01" version fool you. This code successfully reads data from FilePro. This is a "read only" library. We do not believe that you should write to FilePro data with any tool other than FilePro. We further believe that any reading you do with our tools should be from off line backup copies of FilePro data. Your FilePro system is a production system and, like any other production system, should not be touched with development code.

We have applied to add our code to CPAN in November 2009. We will probably change our links to point to CPAN once that has been accepted and processed

If you have a FilePro system and you are looking to migrate it to a newer platform, please contact us. We would be interested in talking to you about what we can do to make that transition eaiser and cheaper.