Fresche Overhauls X-Analysis With Web UI, AI Smarts
May 19, 2025 Alex Woodie
Fresche Solutions recently unveiled a new release of X-Analysis, its popular impact analysis tool, which it’s now selling under the Application Intelligence brand. The product has undergone a major overhaul and now sports a new Web user interface as well as hooks to popular AI models to provide code explanation and documentation capabilities for RPG applications.
Fresche Solutions operates a large application modernization practice and provides an array of products and services to help IBM i customers take their RPG, COBOL, and Java applications from the legacy past into the modern present. However, before a single byte of legacy code is converted, upgraded, or deleted, IBM i shops really need to understand what’s going on inside of their application. That’s where the newly renamed Application Intelligence (or X-Analysis) product comes in.
X-Analysis, which Fresche obtained with its acquisition of Databorough in 2013, is a well-regarded suite of tools used commonly used in application modernization projects. The tool includes cross-referencing, documentation, design recovery, re-engineering, and code generation (EGL and J2EE) capabilities, and counts companies like Fiserv, Mazda, Siemens, and Halliburton as users.
With the new release of X-Analysis announced in April, Fresche has undertaken a major upgrade of the software. For starters, the company has begun replacing some RPG components with Java, which has given the product a performance boost, Fresche chief technology officer John Clark says.
X-Analysis now lets users ask questions of their RPG code directly on the screen.
But users are likely to notice the user interface enhancements, including the new Web interface and the integration with large language models (LLMs) to provide a natural language interface for X-Analysis.
According to Clark, the new React-based front-end will complement and provide another option to the product’s two current interfaces, including the Eclipse-based plug-in that’s used by Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) customers, as well as the greenscreen interface that’s widely used among the SEU set.
In addition to being easier for VS Code users to work with, the new Web UI will also feature new AI-based natural language processing (NLP) capabilities that essentially enable a user to interact with product by asking it questions in plain English.
The new AI-powered documentation capabilities complements existing documentation capabilities in X-Analysis, such as the capability to map database files and program files and to define business rules for pieces of code. The software features hook to LLMs from either OpenAI or Anthropic, which enable users to use natural language commands to essentially drive the X-Analysis product and tap into its impact analysis capabilities, Clark says.
“You can ask it ‘Explain to me what this program does?’ or you can highlight code and say ‘What does this subroutine do?’ and it will in the dialog box give you an English answer of what you just asked it,” he says.
Fresche hasn’t necessarily changed the functionality of XA, Clark says. But they have made it easier to access the existing functionality through the Web browser, he says. For instance, if a user is trying to discover the file relationships in an existing product, that information can now be presented in a browser, where it’s easier to consume. It can also be dumped into an Excel or text file for external analysis.
“It’s a combination of using the intelligence in XA and LLMs to digest and to give meaningful explanations to customers about their code,” he says. “We’ve made it easier to access, and while we were doing that, we made it faster in many cases – up to 10 times faster than it was using the Eclipse plugin.”
Clark says that when he was a programmer tasked with maintaining an RPG application, he used every tool he could find. But sometimes nothing could replace just sitting down and figuring out how the code worked, even if it’s millions of lines long.
“We have some documentation capabilities already with some of the business rules. But this really takes it to a new level,” Clark says. “I wish I’d had something like this years ago, when I landed in a spot like that and had to figure out some of the meanest programs, which needed constant attention.”
While there are other cross-referencing or impact analysis tools available in the IBM i market, few offer the full breadth of capabilities that X-Analysis does, Clark says.
“X-Analysis has some additional functionality that really helps people analyze their systems at a system level as well, and to be able to break them up into manageable pieces,” he says. “Those kinds of tools are typically not available in some of those more rudimentary impact analysis tools.”
Specifically, one component of X-Analysis dubbed “application areas” can help developers to understand how their legacy code is structured and to restructure the business logic in such a manner that the functionality can be replicated in the modern, microservices-based way, according to Clark. That has come in handy with many modernization efforts.
While XA can use AI to help document code, the AI that Fresche is using does not generate RPG. That differentiates it from the new coding co-pilot that IBM is building for RPG. That product, which is slated to be released next month is based on an IBM watsonx model that’s being trained specifically to understand RPG code that is being donated by the IBM i community.
“We have not gone in exactly the same path as they’re going,” Clark says. “But what we’re doing, which is a differentiator for us, is that we already have that knowledge of the relationships in the system. So we’re leaning on that to help us really provide intelligence about the applications people have.”
While popular LLMs have apparently grasped COBOL without too much trouble, they appear to be flummoxed by RPG, Clark says. In its lab, Fresche tried to train an AI model to understand RPG, and it didn’t have great results. In its experience, the AI model struggled to understand core concepts in RPG, such as implicitness, data areas, and the cycle, he says.
Even as Fresche continues to experiment with LLMs in the lab, the company is bullish that the AI approach it has taken with X-Analysis will pay off. “We’re just in the early stages of getting this out into the wild and seeing people take advantage of it, and I’m sure they’ll be using it in ways that we don’t even fully anticipate,” Clark says.
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