Visual LANSA

Lansa changed my whole development cycle

Opmerkingen: We use Lansa for all new development ranging from iSeries green screens to Windows native to cross-browser web development to Mobile. It has turned staffs of mixed talent to single cohesive teams.

Pluspunten:

Time to deployment and reduced investment in having to always learn new skills to keep up. Historically, as interesting as it is for developers to learn new tech and find ways to engage the user and make things easier, this learning curve is time consuming and costly. It also does not insure consistency from developer to developer or adherence to standards. Lansa literally removes all of that. The developer is extracted from that layer and only has to focus on a single development environment that continues to improve and present simple ways to accomplish the latest technologies. It even insures adherence to standards through its common repository and wizards to create many of the most common processes. To take this whole picture to the next level, all of the code is portable, not only from system to system, but between OSs! If your company is using an iSeries and decides that it is time to move to another platform; you can move with it. No new learning curves. No re-development. Pick it up and move it over. I can't emphasize enough how valuable these traits are in environments that do not have the luxury of time and money to continually retrain.

Minpunten:

Hang on tight with the training. Its important and well worth it in the end. But it is easy to get bored with. I find documentation to be sufficient if you have the basis of the training. Once you are through that and understand the concepts and the language, its gold.

Reduces technical baggage and allows you to focus on solving business problems

Opmerkingen: By reducing the amount of technical baggage typically associated with web development, the time from conception to production is radically reduced. This also means that I can focus significantly more of my effort on solving business problems then solving technology problems.

Pluspunten:

I thing I like the most is being able to leave the technical baggage behind and really focus on solving problems for the company. For example, a full stack developer has a host of technologies they have to master to be effective and efficient at their job. If you are developing modern, responsive web applications chances are you are using something along the lines of Angular, React, Ember etc. Besides being yet another thing to know, it brings compilation, packing and deployment issues to the front-end development process. I don't worry about this any more. I develop a component and Visual LANSA handles the compilation, packing and deploying it to the browser for me. On the back-end side you have other frameworks to know. You've got to handle requests with WebAPI, MVC or Spring etc. You have to handle data access with Entity Framework, JPA, Hibernate etc. Then you may have an IoC container bringing everything together. With Visual LANSA Server Modules handle the request and you have just a handful of commands to interact with the database. All of the underlying plumbing that you normally have to deal with is removed as Visual LANSA takes care of it. One last thing that is really nice is the Visual LANSA Framework. If you are doing back office web development, i.e. not consumer facing, then the "Framework" becomes a huge time saver. Its essentially a "Shell" that you plug your components into and it handles all the complexities of the UI for you.

Minpunten:

The thing I like the least is the debugger. The debuggers in Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Chrome's Dev Tools etc, set pretty high expectations and this where I think Visual LANSA could use the most help. Performance when debugging web components is pretty poor. Debugging non-JavaScript based objects like Server Modules, Functions, Windows Forms etc. is good. It's just JavaScript based components that seem to bog down and make stepping through code a very time consuming process. One example is not being able to inspect the contents of a list. You can see how many entries are in it, but you cannot see those entries without iterating the list. This typically leads to a lot of trace messages and essentially debugging through tracing.

Order Entry Platform for 18 Years

Opmerkingen: Ultimately satisfied our business and user needs.

Pluspunten:

Satisfied our order entry GUI needs for our entire enterprise for over 18 years, and still going.

Minpunten:

Ultimately we needed stronger integration and easier deployment options, and are slowly phasing out our LANSA GUI.

LANSA has provided the easiest development effort for any platform of any tool I have used

Opmerkingen: Visual LANSA allows us to substantially increase our development productivity and its ability to generate applications in multiple environments without new developer training allows us to "redeploy" developer resources from legacy technologies to modern functionality.

Pluspunten:

Business Rules can be defined by Business users, eliminating the need for developers to implement libraries or classes to handle the rules, and can be changed "on the fly" for a more agile application. The same skill set can be used for developing windows apps, web pages, and server side services. The developer does not need to learn how to use AWS,REST, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SOAP, etc. They only need to understand how to use the Visual LANSA development environment and language to build full featured applications and services. When HTML5 was introduced, we were able to take advantage of the new functionality without a learning curve. Visual LANSA provides an integrated WYSIWYG for CSS definition. There is no need for creating the text files necessary, or writing the underlying definition code for these products as LANSA does this for you. In addition, LANSA provides a built-in end-user Application environment, the Visual LANSA Framework, This set of programs allow the developer to design the overall application, along with connectivity functionality, cross-program communications, and a uniform end-user experience. The Framework may be deployed in either windows or web/cloud (or both) without redefining the application! Time to market has been significantly reduced and user satisfaction has increased.

Minpunten:

There is a "black-box" aspect to the product that can be a little frustrating when the execution environment does not act as expected. Also, the integration with external components and libraries can be somewhat obtuse. The biggest con is the limited number of developers currently using the product, which limits the amount of community interaction and "Tip" sharing. More developers would mean even more advances in the capabilities of the tool set.

Best Low Code Development Software in the Market

Opmerkingen: Used Lansa tools to solve new and or existing business flows and logic. Used Lansa to switch over from various legacy systems (G/L, order entry, sales etc...). Back a few years we also used Lansa Integrator to interface with Lotus Notes database to create a uniform experience - which including using the data between the two platforms for web applications.

Pluspunten:

Reusable code. Really, reusable code. Write once and rules follow the data around without the need to re-code depending on the interface. Transparent enforcement of the business rules and logic. Can write as granular as needed for your specific requirements. Once that has been accomplished you can concentrate on UI design and coding.

Minpunten:

To many ways to skin a cat with the options to tackle problems. It's great working with various interfaces but sometimes there is limited (or no) documentation to those interfaces (such as when MS released Office 16, little information avaliable to access Excel .net newer features).

Easy to Use Development and Maintenance Tool

Opmerkingen: Visual Lansa is unmatched hybrid low code development platform that amazingly helps for creating responsive web or desktop applications either for cloud or on-premise. It has ability to access data on various platforms then make it available on a web or mobile interface.

Pluspunten:

Visual Lansa is easy for development and modifications, it is user friendly and intuitive software. It also allows interaction with various Microsoft products. It enables user to perform complicated programing tasks with few commands. It performs well in a batch environment and interacts well with other programs.

Minpunten:

It is not easy to automate the process of deployment. The initial install of IDE may be seems more intuitive but sometimes IDE got crashed. Online documentation and debugging tool need to be improved enough.

20+ years and it's never let me down

Opmerkingen: exceptional. i've said many times "if you can't do it in Lansa, you probably don't need to do it." (at least in a business application - you won't write an image processor or a protein sequence analysis program but you can probably integrate with the back end data.) the recent acquisition by Idera has given some pause to the community (there were a flurry of exits from long-timers as well) but so far it seems to be working out.

Pluspunten:

it's not just the software - it's the entire Lansa ecosystem. been using it for over 20 years and it is hands down, the best business software development platform (especially for the IBMi) i've ever dealt with. it's flexible, intuitive, and can do make integration easy and FAST. (side by side, doing something in Lansa vs develop something in RPG or COBOL is 2-3x as fast and 10x more intuitive). in the 20 years, it has always been able to keep up with what needs to be done in the business (and i've seen the product evolved from a green screen, SEU/PDM like interface to one that you can develop robust windows, web, and mobile apps with).

Minpunten:

IDE can be a bit slow (especially when you've just started it) and is a few steps behind a visual studio type interface.

Visual Lansa Frameworks product is the tool to Web enable a large Lansa based ERP Legacy system

Opmerkingen: The greatest benefit is being able to create a professional looking Web site, serving large amounts of ERP information, without having to master many technologies. Lansa handles the continued need to modernize the look and feel as the internet capabilities expand. Small teams who understand the business can master object oriented programming techniques and rapidly expand the web presence for an organization.

Pluspunten:

Visual Lansa Frameworks (VLF) has made it possible to professionally and rapidly Web enable our existing ERP with the following advantages. The legacy ERP system was developed using data modelling relationships and repository based rules. VLF using prototyping which lets us replicate the existing relationships and therefore the application is quickly built and we can just concentrate on user modifications. Secondly, another reason this product builds quickly is because the framework handles the plumbing tasks such as user authentication, menus, tabs, updating multiple windows simultaneously, hiding and restoring windows, printing, filtering columns, etc. Over the past year Lansa VLF updates continue to modernize the Web presentation while insulating the developers from the swift technology changes. Our team can concentrate on the business requirements and programming while Visual Lansa keeps the web site up to the latest state of the art.

Minpunten:

Visual Lansa Frameworks uses component technology to build the application. Our development team had to establish a methodology to ensure all objects were promoted to production when a new release of the Web site is required. This past month Lansa released a new version of VLF with task tracking capability which will keep track of all software objects. Lansa continues to listen to the user community and now our biggest concern using the product has been eliminated.

This product has been a game changer for our company. Write code once and port to host/web/mobile.

Opmerkingen: Ability to access data on different platforms and present it on a web/mobile interface (see the FrameWorks portion of Lansa). This product enables us to leapfrog a number of technologies and I don't need to hire extra staff to develop the UI, security models, font/back-end javascripting, etc. We expanded the capabilities of our current staff and brought them to the future with little pain and not an extensive learning curve from their previous capabilities. A lot of the power that Lansa delivers is hidden under the covers and this saved us a ton of money, time and hiring extra resources.

Pluspunten:

As a database admin I appreciate how you can easily find what object I need changed - be it structure, attribute or a file/field level rule. From that object I can collect all the other related objects in a list that should be compiled as a result of my changes. It won't let me save a change if I didn't do it properly and the software gives me indication exactly where if found an issue so I can resolve it. The software designers provided a feature rich user interface. There are a number of built in capabilities (that I'm not even sure when I will get to using them) so I'm sure we're not going to be outgrowing this product any time soon.

Minpunten:

When checking out/in or compiling there are a number of queues set up to handle these different requests. I would actually like an option to have 1 queue so if I know I am compiling 100 files and want to check them back in I would like to queue up that sequence and not need to wait for the compiles to finish before making my request to check them back in. Would also like audible feedback if a compile failed or an object was locked when checking in so I can work on other things and be interrupted only when necessary. Right now I'm a little glued to the process to verify everything is going as planned until the next action can be taken.

Visual Lansa Review

Pluspunten:

The IDE's inherent usability and straight-forward integration features.

Minpunten:

Not very much documentation or presence online when a problem occurs.

Desarrollos seguros y de calidad

Pluspunten:

Que se generan software seguros y con alto rendimiento.

Minpunten:

Me ha sido difícil conseguir quién conozca el lenguaje para desarrollo.

Noi usiamo dal 2004 Visual Lansa e IBMi (in passato) e vorremmo continuare ad usarlo in futuro

Opmerkingen: Lansa in 16 anni di utilizzo è sempre cresciuto e si è adeguato al mercato anche se non in tempi brevissimi, speriamo che ora oltre a continuare a migliorare il prodotto e darci aggiornamenti in tempi brevi.

Pluspunten:

Visual Lansa si è sempre adeguato in autonomia alle nuove necessità del mercato e permettendoci di dedicarci solo alla parte di sviluppo applicativo e non all'adeguamento della tecnologia. Semplicità di apprendimento per ogni tipo di persona con poca o tanta cultura informatica, serve un ulteriore svecchiamento e uno sforzo maggiore verso le nuove tecnologia.

Minpunten:

Manca l'integrazione con altri applicativi e dispositivi incluso IOT ed altro in modalità nativa e non come ora attraverso applicazioni .net sviluppate a questo scopo. Velocizzare la connessione hai dati anche senza server function la diversità di tempo di accesso è notevole. Continuare da parte Vostra a sviluppare il prodotto dal punto di vista tecnologico per sempificare a noi lo sviluppo sempre più veloce degli applicativi. Ritornare ad una gestione di licenze multiple su singola licenza come erano su IBMi fino all'avvento dell'RMLX questo ci permetterebbe di essere più competitivi e vicino ad altri prodotti sul mercato

I am a person that has many "What If" questions and the Lansa support staff have been excellent.

Opmerkingen: Cost / time savings in development and significant cost savings in ongoing education on the software that seems to come out every six months

Pluspunten:

We are a multi platform environment so we greatly appreciate that Visual Lansa is a software that is Platform Independent. This allows us to maintain our existing infrastructure and saves us significant costs. One of problems that we faced which launched our need to select a new development software package was the number of skilled people we required with proficiency in a wide range of software development applications. Most of these development applications accomplished the same goal but required different skills to create them. The cost of obtaining and maintaining these skilled people were escalating and did not create the value we required. Visual Lansa enabled us the cost benefit of focusing on one development application to rapidly replace and enhance our existing applications with far fewer people. The cost savings have greatly outweighed the initial cost of Visual Lansa.

Minpunten:

I wish they had more prebuilt wizards to complete our common application projects. The Visual Lansa is a development product that allows us to build virtually any application we need on any platform. Some of these applications I feel should be common and therefore I wish Visual Lansa had more prebuilt wizards to create these applications as plugins or built in functions.

Solid product that makes development easier

Opmerkingen: Visual LANSA has allowed our strictly iSeries environment to expand to allow web based objects into our integrations, as well as max field sizes beyond normal green screen.

Pluspunten:

Web based interface make development much easier than on the green screen, plus RDMLX allows for greater field sizes and development tools.

Minpunten:

We have Visual LANSA running on a Citrix setup, which made installation a bit more challenging. Sometimes task management can get confusing with objects checked in/checked out.

Super tool that simplifies technology and let us focus on solving business problems for users.

Opmerkingen: We used it mostly for modernizing a huge existing ERP application. This ERP application is alive and well because of VL.

Pluspunten:

Repository based development and the Framework technology. The repository keeps everything organized and reduces code redundancy and the framework helps you get your application out rapidly by taking care of all the plumbing for you. I also really like the developer friendly IDE and the fact that VL helps you with existing applications (as well as new ones).

Minpunten:

The Framework merge process. If multiple designers are in the same Framework then the process of merging their respective designs is a bit of a pain. I realize that multiple designers in the Framework only happens on very big projects but we went through that and it could have gone better.

Working with Visual LANSA has been great. It is so nice to use one tool for multiple platforms.

Opmerkingen: Time savings; quick to develop and support applications.
The learning curve is quick because it is a single tool to develop for multiple platforms.

Pluspunten:

Visual LANSA allows you to learn one tool to develop for multiple platforms (Windows, Web, IBM i). The single IDE means you learn one tool, not 5 or 6. It is quick for developing and maintaining applications. The IDE hides the complexity of needing to know so many different languages and tools.

Minpunten:

It requires specific knowledge of the LANSA Toolkit and its requirements to get things setup and maintained. This is probably not unique to just LANSA, but some up front effort is required to get started. LANSA Support is very good at either assisting with this task or actually doing it for you.

easy to use.

Opmerkingen: good.

Pluspunten:

as a programmer, I like VL because it is easy to use.

Minpunten:

there are not many open source to use. also there are less users compare to other product.

My Review of Visual Lansa

Pluspunten:

Easy to maintain, cross-platform tool, productive visual IDE, less complex.

Minpunten:

Poor Debugger, One must know the concept and language to use it, limited prebuilt wizards

Recently upgraded to Visual Lansa

Opmerkingen: Maintain current systems, developing new processes without much of a learning curve

Pluspunten:

Developers have had an easy time transitioning from previous version of Lansa. We can maintain legacy applications with ease and potential to upgrade to incorporate .net for future applications.

Minpunten:

Would like better overall search routines, as well as better usage(File/Field/Function) utilities to determine overall impact of changes to an application.