LANSA announces the release of LANSA Composer Version 5 which includes more than 30 new and enhanced activities, including connectors that extend the reach of LANSA Composer to tackle Business Process Integration (BPI) challenges — without programming.

LANSA Composer delivers BPI technology in an intuitive visual environment where business analysts can rapidly design, assemble, automate and integrate business processes. It satisfies the four key requirements of business process integration:

• Transportation — moving data between source and target

• Transformation — mapping data between many different formats

• Process Orchestration — sequential and conditional execution of process flows

• Administration — auditing, error-handling, logging, security and system operations

LANSA Composer provides a library of ready-made activities. Version 5 includes more than 30 new and enhanced activities, including new connectors that expand the ability to reach into sources of data, such as databases, data queues and message queues. Using these ready-made activities, business analysts can be more productive by assembling processes without writing program code.

LANSA Composer BPI solutions can now execute ad-hoc SQL statements against any supported database that is network-addressable. Existing database services, complemented by 12 new activities, provide BPI solutions with more flexibility, including the ability to query a database, create a text file from query results (CSV), set parameters on queries, perform commit and rollback, and execute stored procedures associated with a database.

New message-oriented activities, including watch message queue, data queue or directory, simplify the design of solutions with a requirement to monitor the arrival of files or documents in a file system, and messages in data or message queues. Designing solutions using a message-oriented architecture enables LANSA Composer to participate in long running processes where interactions are asynchronous and the time between messages is indeterminate. Version 5 includes design recommendations that will help optimize the behavior of long-running processes. The messaging features make LANSA Composer the ideal back-end platform for sending or receiving data between mobile, desktop or server applications.

A new XML_QUERY activity permits a LANSA Composer BPI solution to selectively interrogate values contained in XML documents using XML Path Language (XPath) expressions. The activity is intended for selective interrogation of a limited number of particular values from the XML document. A new XML_VALIDATE activity verifies that the XML document is well-formed and conforms to a DTD or an XML schema.

Version 5 provides a new SOAP Web service interface for invoking LANSA Composer BPI solutions, supplementing LANSA Composer's existing ability to invoke SOAP web services.

Version 5 comes with new audit trail events and information, cross-references, and a simpler, faster user-interface. Existing users have praised the new ability to browse the server file system for files and directories that are used during design and testing of LANSA Composer BPI solutions. Improved event notification services equip processes with the ability to send an email or SMS, place a message on a data queue, run a processing sequence or execute a function. Persistent logging of export, import and database housekeeping tasks provides a historical record of system activities.

LANSA is a low-code, high-productivity software development platform for mobile, web, and desktop applications. Visual LANSA's unique low-code development platform, system integration, and digital transformation technologies reduce hand-coding, support multiple languages, and empower development teams to build applications up to 10 times faster. More than 8,000 organizations in 65 countries use LANSA's platform to develop, maintain, and integrate their business applications, ensuring a consistent look and feel with minimal coding. Customers include JPMorgan Chase, Kawasaki, TruGreen, Vistar, and Walt Disney, among others. LANSA is a division of Idera, Inc.