As part of its support for IBM’s Systems Applications Architecture, Excelerator Software Products, the UK subsidiary of Index Technology Corp, has recently announced a new Interface between its computer aided software engineering tools and IBM’s Cross System Product version 3.2.2. This announcement follows that made by IBM in February that the improved version of its Cross System program will ship in July (CI No 1,114). IBM’s program is used to generate applications that can communicate with one another, and be portable across different IBM hardware and software architectures and operating systems. The new Excelerator product, Excelerator/CSP, will support the graphical design of Cross System Product/Application Development systems, and its integrated dictionary has been customised to offer seamless integration so that analysis, design and implementation look the same to the programmer. The graphical support also enables programmers to create a single design for an application that will run across a range of IBM architectures. With this new interface, design data in Excelerator’s Dictionary will be translated into a cross system application definition in IBM’s new External Source Format which interfaces with other products, enabling the format to be imported into the cross system environment for application testing and generation. In this way Excelerator adds front-end design capability to IBM’s new interface, enabling the programmer to do everything from analysing a system requirement and designing a system through to maintaining that system when fully implemented, all from the workstation. A design code can thus be linked to any IBM system from the programmer’s workstation using the Excelerator interface to the External Source Format which then passes the data on to the host mainframe. The host then dumps the data into a Member Specification Library which is accessed by the Cross System Product which then generates the code, passing it on to the Execution Mode where it is manufactured. The customised Excelerator interface also enables users to import cross system application development definitions into the Excelerator design dictionary so that, for example, in the UK existing applications can be re-engineered to suit SSADM. Excelerator/CSP will be launched on the back of IBM’s Cross System Product v3.2.2 in July and runs on PS/2 and AT-alikes. No prices were given for it. XL/Interface to DB2 Excelerator has also introduced XL/Interface, describing it as the most powerful link available between a computer-aided software engineering tool and IBM’s DB2 relational database management system. The company claims that the product enables database administrators to trasnform logical design data produced in Excelerator into physical SQL design data automatically, eliminating the need to re-key design and requirements data. The link incorporates a version of Excelerator XLDictionary customised specifically to describe and document entities for DB2 applications. Again, no prices.
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