Extend Mainframe and Midrange Screens to Web/Mobile/Tablet using Power Apps and Rocket Software

Microsoft

Apr 04, 2023

Overview

In this era, we rely on mainframe and midrange computer applications to track customer information, process orders, check inventory, manage service status, and more. These rock-solid applications are critical to business, but their decades-old workflows and green-screen interfaces often do not meet employees’ or customers’ needs. So usually, the decision is to modernize the entire stack of applications. But often in our modernization journey, we realize that though still relevant, there is no way to unlock the applications and their associated business functionality for web and mobile use.

Learn how to quickly identify and build integration points needed to unlock the value of modernizing legacy applications with cloud, web, mobile, and other middle-tier applications, allowing your company to gain end-to-end visibility and reach a wider user base.

Extend Legacy to Cloud

Whether you are a citizen developer, IT administrator, professional developer, or app wizard, you can easily connect your legacy infrastructure to cloud services with Microsoft’s Power Apps platform and Rocket Software’s suite of modernization solutions (Rocket^® Process Insights, Rocket^® API, and Rocket^® Modern Experience). The powerful yet easy-to-use software provides data-rich information and automation tools that enable you to plan and execute a process that extends your mainframe/midrange system to web/mobile users.

With Microsoft’s Power Apps platform and Rocket Software’s suite of modernization solutions, screen-based application functions such as inventory, ordering, shipping, claims, tax, billing, etc., can be converted into APIs. You can create an invaluable blueprint into critical workflows/business processes and navigation by generating a report that provides data-rich information and insights. You are now armed with data to help inform the creation and significantly reduce the time spent developing APIs. These APIs can then be delivered and consumed as discrete web services without accessing or modifying the underlying RPG or COBOL code. Once the screens and workflows are packaged as Restful APIs, you can use other low-code platforms like Power Apps to build your mobile and web app. Such extensions of legacy screens improve employee productivity and accessibility by giving these processing applications a modern-day front end.

Let us take a deeper look at the software first.

Microsoft Power Platform

Microsoft Power Platform is a line of business intelligence, app development, and app connectivity software applications. It helps create production-ready mobile web apps with less code. Coding experience isn’t required.

Power Apps provides an immediate low code development environment for building custom apps for business needs. It has services, connectors, and a scalable data service and app platform (Microsoft Dataverse) to allow simple integration and interaction with existing data. Power Apps is triggered when Microsoft Power Platform sends a connection request to the Power Apps Resource Provider (RP). Once this happens the Power Apps RP asks the API Hub to create a connection and facilitate authentication token exchange. Power Apps enable the creation of web and mobile applications that can run on all devices. It is a cloud-based application management, so we need not worry about servers, runtimes, updates, and other infrastructure. With a few simple drags and drops, anyone can build and publish a web or mobile app noticeably quickly. And combining Azure services such as Azure API Management and Azure Functions, you can scale and extend your mobile/web apps and respond to changes rapidly and safely in a controlled manner.

Rocket Software

Rocket Software has dedicated over 30 years to helping customers get the most out of their systems by drawing upon its uniquely deep experience of bringing automation to modernization workflows and processes. Rocket Software’s comprehensive portfolio of modernization and automation tools includes:

Rocket^® Process Insights

A visual tool that lets you see your workflows in totality, providing the information you need to build a smart modernization plan. It tracks how your organization engages with the data and business logic of your IBM^® i (or IBM zSystems^®) and provides you with clear visibility into every green-screen data process, creating an invaluable blueprint into critical workflows/business processes and navigation. The deployment of Rocket Process Insights is easy and doesn’t require any RPG expertise—simply let it run and securely collect data in the background of your day-to-day operations. Once it has collected enough data, Rocket Process Insights will generate heatmaps that reveal commonly accessed datasets, workflows, and instances that reveal exactly how the business engages with the IBM i application, including how often a particular workflow is used or dataset is accessed. You’ll be able to visually see every type of interaction with each IBM i application—helping you build a data-driven strategy that eliminates redundancy and wasted time within your workflows. Then, you can leverage the insights by offering one-click API service generation by connecting to Rocket API (IBM i only). In addition, this data will prove to be invaluable in helping you build modern user experiences and workflows that provide real results to the business.

Rocket^® API

Rocket API helps unlock the valuable information stored in host applications for use virtually anywhere: cloud, mobile, self-service applications, and more. It delivers quick and significant ROI from automating your IBM i (or IBM zSystems^®) processes. Using Rocket API, you can turn your proven, host-based systems into modern API-enabled platforms utilizing SOAP or RESTful services, making integrating core business functionality into web or mobile experiences easy. With its singular approach, Rocket API enables developers to create application APIs from host-based applications—without requiring modifications to the underlying source. Built-in intelligence ensures that codebase changes do not break the connection between your APIs and the applications that call them.

As a result, it enables businesses running legacy applications to modernize by building workflows and innovative experiences that align with how customers and employees engage with a company without the time, expense, or risk typically associated with modernization efforts. Monitoring and management functions can be employed to ensure peak performance, prioritize access, or monetize code assets. Rocket API fits into any current application infrastructure using a low-code model—eliminating the need to write new application code. It deploys to any local, cloud, or hybrid environment.

Rocket^® Modern Experience

Rocket Modern Experience facilitates building modern user experiences for your mainframe and iSeries applications without relying on developers with COBOL or RPG programming expertise. It also enhances your employees’ and customers’ web and mobile experiences while increasing productivity. It helps improve user and customer workflow by combining multi-screens into a single page view. It can also offer new functionality to employees by leveraging third-party APIs like zip code validation, google maps integration, and others. Rocket Modern Experience successfully upgrades traditional green screens with modern UIs that employees find intuitive.

Example

There are several ways you can build these integrated solutions. Both Microsoft Power Platform and Rocket’s suite of modernization solutions give users the data and the flexibility to determine what type of workflow, APIs, and web/mobile/tablet app you want to build, all backed up by real and in-depth data. You can create your custom integration based on customer needs for scalability, automation, and complexity of use cases.

Here is an example of how these software products could work together for a simple use case.

Install Rocket Workbench in an Azure VM and connect Rocket Software with the Mainframe via 3270 protocols.
Using the workbench screen, record the CICS App and create microflow. Deploy the workflow as an API and generate the REST API JSON.
Install Rocket Software’s Automation Hub in the Azure VM and host the API in Rocket Software’s Runtime Engine as a web service.
Onboard the API into Azure API Management. Register the API and build policies, authentication, and gateways if needed.
Create a custom Power App connector.
Create a Power App and use the API from the power platform.
Publish the Power App for users' handheld devices.

In this example, we have used Azure API Management, which helps customers abstract backend architecture diversity and complexity from API consumers and securely expose services hosted on and outside Azure as APIs. This way, you enable API discovery and consumption by internal and external users and still be able to protect, accelerate, and observe APIs.

Potential Use Cases

Due to competitive needs, evolving consumer demands, remote working, and various other reasons, organizations want to connect disparate legacy systems and give users access through a web/mobile UI. They can enable direct access to applications through smartphones and tablets via web browsers for users on the field or working from home, thus improving productivity.

Businesses looking to automate workflows between applications and implementing seamless business processes without changing existing legacy applications can also explore this solution. The adoption can be at a scale and pace that the customer wants.

You need not modernize all the legacy green screens or CICS applications in one go, nor do you need to re-skill your entire crew on the workflows. They have been used to these workflows for decades and can continue to use them—but now from any handheld devices. Since the software does not alter your back-end process, you can discontinue the use at any time or offer the users to use green screens and web/mobile UI simultaneously. It is wholly based on the customer’s choice and needs. You can decide when to use what, or if you want to use both or discontinue using one.

Conclusion

The race to the cloud is on, and IT leaders are under tremendous pressure to modernize and achieve business superiority. Yet, they need help finding the insights required to know where to start, how to implement, and what to transform. A discovery process is critical for businesses to unlock fast and significant bottom-line value from their modernization and automation projects. Armed with a data-rich, data-informed modernization plan built with the knowledge of how your business truly engages its applications, you will be ready for action. Business strategies and needs change rapidly, so organizations must be able to build solutions based on those changing needs. By responsibly enabling citizen developers (Power Users) as part of development processes, we can create hybrid development teams that empower the entire organization to grow. As you look for tools to execute your plan, Microsoft’s Power Apps platform and Rocket Software’s suite of modernization solutions can help you best manage each step of your Modernization and Automation Plan.