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GCN Home > July 26, 1999 issue

Why customize APIs if you don’t have to?

Companies suggest using point-and-click wizards to ease apps integration

By Florence Olsen
GCN Staff
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connections between source databases in

Application programming interfaces often demand nearly as much attention as the applications themselves, according to some software industry officials.
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SAP R/3 apps and target databases. It

Agencies that have paid systems integrators to develop custom and often poorly documented application interfaces are finding themselves stuck with high lifecycle costs, said Harry Wong, president and ch
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handles event logging and load balancing.
ief executive officer of Casahl Technology Inc. of San Ramon, Calif.

“Customization is a polite word for hacking. They hack their way through, charging a lot of money,” Wong said. At every major upgrade, the application interfaces change, creating more manual work for the integrators, he said.

Wong believes a better alternative is the new generation of enterprise application integration tools from data integration vendors such as his company and Convoy Corp. of Emeryville, Calif.

Convoy/DM 3.0 and Casahl’s Replic-Action 6.0 avoid custom coding. Instead, a database or application administrator manages the automated interface relationships between source and target data through point-and-click graphical wizards.


Convoy/DM 3.0 transforms data from source
databases and puts it in the right place in
the target app. It extracts data and metadata
from all PeopleSoft modules.




No wand needed

With the Replic-Action wizard, an application administrator can synchronize data between most workgroup apps and enterprise apps, Wong said. “We’ve built on top of Microsoft Transaction Server and our own clustering technology,” he said.

Replic-Action 6.0 extends the real-time synchronization of Casahl’s Replic-Action for Notes to Microsoft Corp. workgroup products such as Internet Information Server, Exchange Server, Office, and database managers Access and FoxPro.

The Replic-Action software provides connectors for workgroup apps to enterprise and database applications from SAP America Inc. of Wayne, Pa., J.D. Edwards & Co. of Denver, PeopleSoft Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif., Oracle Corp., Sybase Inc., Microsoft, Informix Corp. and IBM Corp.

Replic-Action 6.0 handles the event logging, point-and-click integration, real-time transaction processing, data synchronization, transformation, workflow triggering, job sequencing and load balancing.

“The minute you put more than one Replic-Action server there, you automatically load-balance,” Wong said.

Replic-Action runs under Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 on Intel hardware. “We recommend a machine with sizable memory,” preferably 128M or more, Wong said.

Replic-Action moves data changes from Microsoft SQL Server, for example, into SAP R/3 and from SAP R/3 into SQL Server. “At no time do you need to install R3 on your laptop” if you are sometimes a disconnected user, Wong said, even though SAP might still charge for concurrent-use client licenses. “You can make changes to the database on the road and update the changes via modem,” Wong said.



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