Windows application to a cross-platform web-based solution without a rewrite

A Windows healthcare application for clinics and physicians needed a cost-effective way to accommodate all operating systems without reducing the existing functionality and security. Since users use a variety of operating systems, it was determined that a web-based version of the application was the best way to overcome those installation roadblocks. This was also a great opportunity to enable tablet access as well and reach users who use tablets such as the iPad for work.

A solution to turn this local Windows application to a cross-platform web-based solution was needed. It was important to complete the migration without having to manually rewrite the application and with minimal changes and resources involved. Running some assessment tools on the existing application provided estimations that almost 98% of the code could be automatically migrated into rich ASP.NET using the Instant CloudMove tools. “When we received the project estimations from the migration experts at Gizmox we were a bit skeptical at first as it seemed too good to be true” said Dr. Wendy Graham, Mihealth CEO and added “not only that the solution was exactly what we needed but it was also priced lower than all other alternatives.”

Those optimistic estimations turned into reality very quickly as the code migration was completed by Gizmox in only a couple of weeks. Then, in less than 2 months the entire project was completed and the migrated web-based physician tool was ready for delivery.

The final product was a completely identical version to the Windows application, with all of the functionalities, appearance, and feel, but was available through a web-browser from anywhere in the world. This allowed Mihealth to reach all clinics/physicians without turning away any potential customers. Implementation of mihealth™ also became much easier, as sales representatives did not face any of the previous complications when installing the application in a busy clinic on unfamiliar hardware or operating software. “Migrating mihealth to a web-based technology means we can now reach more customers with much less operative efforts and resources on our side. I can definitely say it made us more competitive” concluded Dr. Graham.

The original story was published here.

Brinks Bolivia Customer Service System - the eSAC System allows registration and management of contacts for a customer and in addition to maintaining an updated status of each service or customer request, to have accurate information and perform the appropriate procedures for all applications.

The system was originally developed in VB6 and since web access was essential it was offered via Citrix. Since the application's performance was a critical issue as well as the need to offer the system without specific installations the company looked for a solution that would solve those drawbacks of using Citrix.

Searching for a solution that would allow it to offer the eSAC system over the web without the need for specific client installations and provide sufficient performance levels even when there is limited bandwidth lead Brinks to a decision to migrate their VB6 Customer Service system to the Visual WebGui Web/Cloud Platform.

"Developing on Visual WebGui we were able to migrate the system to web environment and even add new features in less time which allows us to offer it over a standard web browser with better performance and no installations as was required with Citrix," concluded Alexander Cuellar.

Go to the Visual WebGui website to read to full article >

Open Letter to the Editor of CIO regarding Cloud applications

This is an Open Letter to the Editor of CIO in response to an article posted on Computer World discussing the five problems that supposedly keep legacy applications out of the Cloud.

Dear Editor,

In light of your recent article about the challenges that legacy application face in migrating to the cloud, below please find a response which provides answers to 4 of the most problematic issues. We believe your readers would greatly benefit from the information, and we regret that we were not directly interviewed about these issues in advance of your article. We recognize your hesitation to publish such a piece because it promotes a product so blatantly, due to the originality and uniqueness of Visual WebGui, currently being the only one in the world that can take .NET desktop applications directly to the cloud with the click of a button. Your readers were told of the problems with the cloud, and we believe that they will find it useful to know that most of the concerns raised in your article have already been attended to by VWG. We’re one step ahead of the market with our real world and vision.

1. Just as no 2 clouds in the sky are alike… For those who are not familiar enough with Cloud technology, it’s easy to throw together all cloud platforms into one category. But that’s like throwing planes, trains and automobiles into one category and making them all equal. With all due respect, in reality, the advancement of the cloud today means that “cloud platform” can refer to different architectures, capabilities and services, starting from the virtual machines bases clouds (such as the Amazon AWS or the v-Cloud by VMware) to the most abstract deployment form of clouds (such as Windows Azure or Google App Engine), and everything in between. It’s not one product but rather a myriad that have a single common denominator: they all provide a dynamic form of web applications/environments hosting. We can bind them all together but only with a pure web architecture that is cloud aware and can benefit from the various services using the most common approach.That exists today in solutions such as Visual WebGui, which is a pure (managed) .NET based platform which executes plain web applications; in addition to its ability to connect different clouds, it offers benefits that can save organizations significant funds. For example, with proper planning, it can be possible to perform migration of apps from one cloud provider to another without having to perform major changes.
   
2. Behind the lock and key…The potential serious security hazards are hindering enterprises from moving to the cloud, as exposing a software application to the public web can potentially result in unauthorized access to data. Furthermore, being able to trust a complete isolation of storage and being able to audit and monitor access, as well as to grant and prevent permissions on those systems, is an open issue.But here again, there is a solution. One of Visual WebGui’s primary by design advantages is that the entire application runs on the server using a very organized methodology that makes it possible to audit every move of any user on the system, and grant or prevent access from users at runtime.And in terms of client (browser or device) safety, VWG ‘empty client’ runtime paradigm offers a complete secured client, making it impossible to disrupt or change the server’s logics by manipulating the client scripts. The ‘empty client’ also means that the client never exposes applicative data that was not supposed to be presented on the screen, a scenario that is often caused by the development method on which developers use applicative data to link between client piece with the server. Furthermore, data is never cached on the browser.
   
3. You don’t know your legacy apps… Line-of-business applications are extremely critical to the business, and demand an expedited means of transferring the current forms, complexities and logics to the cloud, as an alternative of the hundreds of thousands of hours of work that would have to be put in by human effort. Alternatively, significant experience can be left behind, resulting in much reduced productivity and loses. Visual WebGui offers full migration path for legacy WinForms and VB 6.0 applications including their entire business logics, forms and complexity to the cloud environment through a low costing and much less painful process.
   
4. Migration is manual and too darn few tools will help… Migration of legacy applications to cloud environments can be costly, especially when it comes to complex highly invested enterprise applications. Using Visual WebGui can cut down the manual labor, and even eradicate it, due to a straight forward path of migration for WinForms and VB 6.0. Currently, this is the best starting point for migration of any other desktop technology to the cloud.
   

The security of the cloud, the storage, the ability to migrate apps to the cloud, and all other “problems” that worry the world are merely a walk on the beach with Visual WebGui. So what’s the downside? Only that if Google Apps had used Visual WebGui, newspapers would have lost a lot of their headlines over the past few months!

Web enabling data warehouse solution made possible with Visual WebGui

"Visual WebGui Rich Internet Applications Platform reduces the complexity of web development to a minimum. The fact that the developer no longer needs to think like a web developer saves a huge amount of time and allowed the application to be market ready in a very short time." said Joerg Stieg whose company TIP management AG ported its data warehouse solution's configuration and planning tool UI to the web and redesigned the HCe® Web front-end.

"Creating such a feature-rich application in this very short time would have been impossible without Visual WebGui." Joerg Stieg

Go to the full case study.

WinForms over Web - A unique approach to AJAX development

There is a really good article posted on programmers-tech explaining Visual WebGui's Web Development platform uniques approach and benefits for developing web applications.

"Visual WebGui a unique approach to AJAX development Visual WebGui is not just another AJAX framework but rather a different approach to web application development, specially designed to simplify building highly complex applications like Outlook Web Access (OWA). Visual WebGui makes it possible for developers to create applications that were previously developed only by the "big guys". While web development environments such as ASP.NET and JSP have made huge strides in creating a rich environment for developing web applications, they have always targeted a very wide range of applications from content rich sites to OWA like applications. By doing so, they forced a compromise that was very painful for applications developers. Concepts like pages, html, requests and responses, which originated from the historical evolution of web development, are not really suitable for developing applications.

Visual WebGui uses a proven application development toolset that was designed for application development from the outset. Visual WebGui’s methodology – Winforms over Web (WOW) - originates from environments like MFC and the popular Visual Basic environment."

Click here to read the full article.