Eradani Bridges The Gap Between Legacy And Open Source
July 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In this publication, legacy is not a dirty word or even remotely pejorative. Rather, “legacy” is just a shorthand way of delineating between applications that encapsulate decades of the evolution of a business and the transactions it processes, and all of the other new stuff that this business is also doing and perhaps coding with newer tools and programming languages.
A new company, called Eradani, has been founded by some experts in both the IBM i world and the open source world with the express purpose of building a technical bridge so these two different cultures can see a unified, hybrid system without knowing all of the details of both sides of that system. This is a lot easier than having heated arguments about how things should be done or whose software stack is better or worse.
Eradani, which is named after the sun around which the planet Vulcan orbits in the Star Trek science fiction series and which is actually a constellation in the southern hemisphere with several stars bearing that name (but spelled Eridani), was founded by Dan Magid, who was most recently in charge of the modernization labs and sales specialists teams at Rocket Software. Magid came to Rocket Software back in 2011, when that software conglomerate acquired software change management tool maker Aldon Software, where Magid was its long-time chief executive officer. Aldon was co-founded by Albert Magid, his father, and Don Parr back in 1979 in the wake of the System/38 launch, so the Magid family has deep, deep roots in the IBM i world. (Aldon had previously sold itself to private equity firm in 2007.)
“For me, it is getting back into the entrepreneurial environment, which is what I really like,” explains Magid. “I like being in small companies where we can be very agile about what we do, and it also gives me a chance to work with some good people. Big companies, for me, are a little harder. But I am getting the best of both worlds, because I still get to work with Rocket Software and its customers because we are working in the IBM i world and addressing the modernization space with products that I have been working on for decades.”
Once Aldon became part of the Rocket Software conglomerate, Magid spent most of his time traveling around the world talking to the biggest IBM i shops and trying to get a handle on what their biggest issues were. And the big challenge was not precisely a technical one, but really a cultural one that has created a technology divide. At most of these companies that are using software change management tools like the ones Aldon created and Rocket acquired to add to its portfolio, there is one team of people that are creating and maintaining the RPG, SQL, and CL applications that embody the mission critical, back office systems that are the backbone of the company, and a completely different team with different software stacks and experiences are doing Web, mobile, and social infrastructure.
For most shops, it is not practical to cross train developers to work on both stacks, although at some companies an RPG developer dabbles in Java or PHP or maybe now Python or Node.js (server-side JavaScript, really). These are very different platforms requiring very different skillsets. Eradani’s core product – and Magid says there are several under development right now – is called Eradani Connect, and it is a framework that allows developers who are working in Java, JavaScript, and Python to talk to RPG programs and the Db2 for i database management system, and for RPG and SQL programmers working in the IBM i environment to talk to applications created using these open source tools in a way that feels native. This is all done transparently using REST calls and with JSON as an interchange format, and basically it allows for the Java, JavaScript, or Python developers to see IBM i functions or its database as if it were a normal Linux system or a MySQL database management system. RPG programmers will, conversely, make a call using RPG or CL or SQL and see what they think is the Db2 for i database, when what they are really doing is invoking Java, JavaScript, or Python calls or tickling other open source databases.
As you might imagine, this framework is a bit tricky to build and to make seamless. Aaron Magid, the third generation of the family to be in the business, says that to accomplish this feat, the Eradani Connect framework is written for each language in the actual language so it can be bound tightly for each of those languages. The client side that allows for the IBM i platform to reach out into open source languages with that REST interface is written in CL on the IBM i side and transfers control over to JavaScript running on Node.js on the same Power Systems iron. The idea here is to use all of these different legacy and open source tools on the same physical Power Systems machinery, although if you are willing to pay a latency premium they can make calls across the framework over networks between distinct machines. The programming languages, and therefore the Eradani Connect framework, can run in Linux and IBM i partitions or in some cases within the PASE AIX runtime environment embedded in IBM i itself.
Exactly where the Eradani Connect framework runs depends in part on the way the Power Systems server and its operating systems need to be secured. In this way, Eradani Connect acts as a kind of gateway between the open source languages and functions and databases that are sitting on IBM i, and only the framework or the native, legacy applications that already exist are allowed to access those IBM i functions and databases. It is not at all the same thing like dropping an IBM i machine onto an Ethernet network and opening it up to anyone and everyone. Anything that has not been explicitly allowed in the policy engine embedded in Eradani Connect is absolutely denied.
Eradani Connect is available now, and the base product is priced at $5,000 per partition it runs on, whether it is running IBM i or Linux. This is a perpetual license, which does not include annual software support fees, and being a base license means that additional plug ins for the Git repository and Jira software bug tracking software are not included.
