Profesionales Asociados (PA) is a GeneXus subdistributor
company in Neuquen, which offers specialized services provided by a
multidisciplinary work team. "Our services are mainly directed to Small and
Medium Sized companies and we think they need the same management and
technological tools as large companies", pointed out Ricardo Callela, a partner
at PA.
The company develops and markets a company management
software that uses GXflow, ARTech's Workflow tool. PA's application has over
2,000 GeneXus objects; it was generated for Visual Fox Client Server, and now it
is being migrated to Java-WEB and GXFlow 8.0., informed Callela.
When the company decided to migrate the applications built
for Win envorinment to Web environment, it studied and approved several
alternatives. "The first one was performing the manual transfer of all
transactions and work panels, coding and simulating all the behavior achieved in
the original environment. This methodology certainly looked as the simplest and
most natural way, so we decided to take it", explained Callela.
We started from a 32-transaction stock, which implement a
service order generation system for computer equipment. But as the migration
progressed, we started noticing certain aspects that are not taken into account
in Win environment applications development but constitute inherent restrictions
for the development of applications for the Web, he pointed out. "Aspects to be
considered did not just include those concerning object behavior, but also their
appearance for the achievement of a user-friendly interface with the
professional look of graphic design and coherence among all the objects", he
added.
Faced with the unfeasibility of the first techniques they
had chosen, the company searched for a new solution and decided to use GeneXus
Patterns tool. .
"Thanks to this tool it was possible to take all the
transactions of the Knowledge Base, and generate in very few steps the GeneXus
objects with the necessary interface to operate the whole system with a
professional graphic design quality", stated Fabian Huenuman, a member of
Profesionales Asociados development team.
"Not only did we achieved system functionality but we also
saved substantial migration time. The migration was performed by a junior
analyst in just 25 days, which included the training with both the tool and the
target environment of the migration, that is to say, the Web environment. This
time is considerably lower when compared with the estimated time if we had
continued with the first attempted migration techniques, emphasized
Huenuman.
Additionally, the tool has enough parametrization capacity
to enable the customization of the application to the needs not just of the
users but also the analyst, ranging from the language to the structure of the
generated pages. It even implements basic security features automatically, a
critical aspect in this type of applications, commented the developer.
After this first application they decided to use Patterns
in several new developments as a complement of the GXFlow tool; the latter
enables modelling processes very quickly but a lot of time was wasted with the
ABM of the auxiliary tables, user report options and other operations that are
not oriented to processes.
With this GXflow-Patterns WorkWith combination development
productivity increased exponentially, concluded Huenuman.
PA started developing with GeneXus 6.1 and uses GXflow
from the beginning, since all its applications are built with the Management by
processes paradigm. Today the company uses GeneXus 8.0 and GeneXus Yi version
for their new developments.
In addition to Patterns, Profesionales Asociados is using
client level Validation in WEB, Bussines Component, Master Pages and LDAP new
features of theYi version, and this month it has started trying MySQL.