Our client has a legacy application written in Natural/Adabas 20 years ago. Of course, it has been changing throughout the years, but all the
changes had rather a maintenance nature. Recently we moved this application from mainframe to UNIX environment and now we are starting the major modernization of the system.
The client direction is to stay with Software AG technology and our improvements efforts are mainly in architecture restructuring of the major pieces of the application.
In modern technologies you always can find a lot of examples/support on websites and we want to start designing these new (or redesigning old) pieces of the application following certain Design Patterns/Framework.
I was hoping to find something on SAG website, but unfortunately did not have a lot of luck and was not able to find anything like Design patterns or Framework for Natural/Adabas application.
If anybody can point me to the right direction I would really appreciate it.
As the Moderator of this thread, when I have time, I look through to see if there are unanswered postings. I came across your posting.
I would suggest you try the thread for Open Systems.
That said, it would also help if you narrowed the posting a bit. Are you looking for detailed recommendations along the lines of programming guidelines? Or conceptual criteria along the lines of user interfaces, structure of objects, etc?
As you noted, Natural has been evolving over the years. What were considered appropriate design objectives in Version 1 were quickly outdated with the release of Version 2. Natural on the PC (which I always thought should have been called Visual Natural), changed things again; and the advent of new Web facilities is changing things again.
In the absence of written materials, look to include on your team people familiar with Natural on your platform (unix) and people (if still available) from the original design team of the legacy (mainframe) system. The latter would be very useful in explaining the basis for the legacy design; the former would be able to provide a framework for the new system.