Welcome to TransforMix

Migrating Applications

Rehosting applications HP 3000, MPE/X to an open-environment can be a daunting task. Not only are there programs written in a number of programming languages some that only exists in the HP 3000 environment but there is also MPE’s unique style of JCL and the tools and utilities contained inside them that must be migrated as well. When this is combined with program behavior at runtime including process handling within the program it reveals that moving a program from MPE to another platform has the potential to create an exponential set of challenges for developers, testers and maintainers of these software assets. The powerful Transformix Tools Software suite combined with services from Transformix provide a comprehensive solution to meet these challenges. The software suite includes SunGard BI-tech Transport and Transformix Tools which together provides tools for migrating legacy code currently hosted on HP 3000 MPE/iX to more modern platforms.

Migrating and Modernizing Programming Languages

In the HP 3000 environment in even a “simple COBOL shop” there might also be programs written in other languages such as BASIC and SPL. Larger shops may have even more languages in use such as COBOL, BASIC, Speedware, BRW, Transact, SPL and PASCAL. Either of those shops will usually make use of third party tools such as Suprtool, Datanow, FORMATION, etc. Even COBOL migrations are not trivial. Without software tools, Dialog changes from one COBOL to another can be time consuming and error prone. However, languages such as BRW and Transact present an even greater challenge because they are only implemented on the HP 3000. Transformix provides dialog converters or transformers for programming languages such as COBOL, C and Speedware that have acceptable replacement compiler counterparts available on target platforms. Secondly, it provides programming language translators for languages such as BASIC to C, SPL to C and PASCAL to C for languages for which C is a suitable replacement. Finally, it provides like-for-for like replacements or reimplementation for tools such as BRW, QUERY/3000 and Suprtool by creating custom language translators and runtimes to mostly automate the migration of MPE/iX based software artifacts to open platforms.

Adaptive Database Access Level™

Modern databases use industry standard programming interfaces such as ODBC, SQL, JDBC, etc. Data access on an HP 3000 is unique and proprietary. The database is usually TurboIMAGE it is accessed using TuboIMAGE intrinsics collectively be called the TurboIMAGE API. Other proprietary file types are KSAM, MPE Message Files, MPE Circular files and MPE flat files. Moreover, programs and utilities using MPE-based data expect to be in an environment that offers labeled files and file equations.

With our trademarked Adaptive Database Access Level™ Transformix adapts TurboIMAGE, KSAM and Message File programming interfaces to the leading RDBMS's of your choice. Our tools allow TurboIMAGE data, KSAM files and MPE Message files to be stored in the leading industry standard RDBMS’s. These include Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 and Postgresql. Other file types are stored in the native file system of the platform. Programs can access the data in the RDBMS can either use the MPE intrinsics or native SQL for access. Moreover, at the time of migration, data types can be converted to RDBMS data types the most popular change is use of the native date type. However, even though dates can be changed from a COBOL X(6) for example to an RDBMS date type, the existing MPE/iX programs do not need to be changed. They can still refer to the data as an X(6).