Services
 Conversion Services
Whatever hardware or operating system platforms you are moving
between, our range of porting tools and services is certain to reduce
time, cost and risk.
Doric Computer Systems provide a range of consultancy services from complete
project management and conversion and on-site installation, to telephone
advice to your own specialists.
Our expertise covers the many tricky areas from moving applications
and their data (e.g. legacy COBOL systems), to translation of operating
system scripts and software products themselves.
This is complemented by a wide portfolio of tools that can handle automatically
many of the nastiest problems faced in media conversion such as; binary
high-endian/low-endian, real numbers, packed decimal, 7 and 8 bit parity
and incompatible ISAM file formats. Where appropriate, we offer these
for rental on client's own machines to ensure full control for the client.
Through the wide range of hardware platforms we maintain in-house, plus
our close links with industry partners,
we can also offer complete turnkey porting facilities, to provide fast,
reliable porting off-site with minimum disruption to customer's ongoing
support and development work.Conversion Services
We can, for example, run your applications through INFOSCAN or INFOCVT
using our computers and return the application to you in a wide variety
of formats for installation and testing. Our staff use many in-house
tools, techniques and utilities or will create specialized ones for
specific projects. Doric can also be commissioned to create custom conversions
utilities for your needs, write shell scripts, and can port your own
DBUSR commands.
Top of page
Porting Tools
More and more INFO users find themselves faced with the question: "How
do I move my INFO applications from my ageing PRIME or DEC VAX to UNIX
, DEC AXP Open VMS or Windows NT ". To provide users with a
cost effective solution, Doric Computer Systems has developed two software
utilities, INFOSCAN & INFOCVT.
INFOSCAN - Source Scanner
INFOSCAN is an interactive, menu driven application designed to interrogate
an INFO or INFO-Text application, and report on many standard and user
defined criteria. Changes to Programs, Data File templates, Input Forms
,Special Forms and Reports can be singularly or globally applied. The
procedure normally consists of taking a copy of an operational application
and modifying it for a target operating system. Although this part of
the process is not strictly necessary in advance of using INFOCVT, it
does mean that an application can be made ready to run on another operating
system prior to porting.
INFOCVT - Application Converter
INFOCVT ports INFO and INFO-Text applications and data from one operating
system format to another. All information concerning the source and
target formats and locations are entered on the command line. No changes
are made to source code, and external file references will be changed
to local ones, or optionally can be retained in the original format.
Normal source code changes when moving between completely different
operating systems are generally in the area of spooling printed output,
references to external data files in commands such as GET and SAVE,
and spawning external commands. For example, pathnames have different
delimiters: under Primos ABC>XYX>FRED is a valid pathname and
file, under Open VMS it would need to be [ABC.XYZ]FRED, while under
UNIX operating systems this would be /abc/xyz/fred. Some applications
will, for example, build up a pathname from several different sources
for subsequent use in a GET, SAVE or OUTPUT command. A literal in the
form of 'ABC>XYZ>FRED' may never appear in the INFO code as a
whole. To help detect uses of this and similar techniques, use INFOSCAN
(see above).
Reviewing Applications
When customers move platforms they frequently take a fresh look at
their applications and tidy up or standardize on naming conventions,
file storage, global variables and methodology in general. They may
also have been developed some time ago, and could be revised for performance
reasons to use more efficient techniques. INFOSCAN can help save a great
deal of time by giving you a lot of useful information.
Top of page
|