If you look closely, you’ll find hidden treasures all around you. Sometimes, these treasures are in places you haven’t dared to venture in a while. Maybe in some remote closet or storage unit, there’s an old wool coat that, once cleaned, will save you from buying a new winter coat. Other times, the treasures are in plain sight, part of your everyday existence. Think about that old car in the garage that you keep saying you’re going to restore. Or the old pieces of furniture that are collecting dust. With a little time and effort, these perceived articles of junk often become treasures of some value. So it goes with legacy applications. As Y2K modifications and testing become distant memories (we hope), it’s time to perform some “spring cleaning” of your business applications to see if there are any hidden treasures. When you modified your code for Y2K compliance, did you clean it thoroughly? Probably not. Why would you? You did what you needed to do: fix the dates to handle Y2K.

Now, business requirements and customer inquiries demand that you move your business to the Web. Additionally, your customer service representatives have seen all sorts of nifty GUI tools to help them do their jobs more efficiently and service their customers more effectively. What are you to do? Should you completely rewrite your applications to meet the IT demands of the 21st century? Or is there a way to leverage the heavy investment you have in your legacy applications and still add “yourcompany.com” to your business cards and marketing literature? The good news is that you’re not alone; many IT shops are faced with the same questions. The better news is that you have many solutions from which to choose, so finding the right fit for your shop is more than just a viable option: It’s recommended.

That’s where this focus section comes in. Packed in these articles are tools and techniques to help you modernize and revitalize your legacy applications to meet your upcoming Web and GUI challenges. We start with Ted Holt’s article, “Programming for the Lowest Common Denominator.” This article explains how you can interact with customers via the Web by using CGI APIs with RPG to dynamically generate HTML from your application data. Then, in my article, “The First Degree of Separation,” I discuss how to further modernize your legacy applications by separating the business logic from the user interface (UI), thus opening up the business logic to the Web and client/server applications. To understand more on how applications interact with each other once the UI and the business logic have been separated, check out Joe Pluta’s messaging article, “Opening Up Your Options.” Messages are the keys for allowing the UI to communicate with the

business logic, regardless of the protocol used. The next step is to attach a graphical front- end to that business logic. Joe Pluta tells you how in “Revitalization—Put on a GUI Face.” Finally, take a magic carpet ride with Don Denoncourt in “Application Modernization Nirvana.” Don will enlighten you by explaining how to completely modernize your applications using object-oriented design (OOD) and tools such as Java servlets, JavaServer Pages (JSP), and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB).

I hope that by employing one or more of the techniques provided in this section, you are able to see that your legacy application is actually a hidden treasure that needs only a little revitalization to put it on the path toward application modernization nirvana—the beauty of this path being that any stop along the way may be the right one for your company.