The FORD TWOS application is the payroll and employee time management system that runs in over 50 plants across North America. At the time of the migration the same environment was running on an HP3000 server in each of these plants. The goals were to migrate this critical application to run on Linux and at the same time, reduce the number of server from 50+ to less than a dozen.
The main requirement for the migrated application was to make to external changes to the application. Everything had to work and react the same way between the Linux version and the original MPE version. Nothing could be changed past the OS login.
The entire application (800 modules) was written in an HP-proprietary 3.5 GL language called Transact. This language was built around MPE and its components, such as VPlus, IMAGE, KSAM, etc. Sector7 created a Transact to COBOL translator, which took the Transact source code and generated COBOL code that could be compiled on MPE or Linux.
At the same time, the original designer of Transact rewrote the Transact support library moving it from the original SPL code to C code. On MPE, this library makes native use of the MPE intrinsic libraries to access MPE, IMAGE, KSAM and VPlus.
On Linux, the new Transact support library was linked to Transport abstraction layer to simulate the MPE-centric system calls and interface to Oracle instead of IMAGE, KSAM and VPlus.
The IMAGE databases and datasets were automatically migrated to Oracle tables and various Oracle triggers were automatically created to maintain the integrity of the data in the manner of TURBOIMAGE so all IMAGE calls could be supported without changes to the application code.
Since the generated COBOL code could be compiled and run on MPE, the migration could be verified on MPE to make sure the generated code and the Transact support library worked as required without the Transport layer. This way any differences between the Linux version of the application and the original application could be traced down to the transpiler, the Transact support library or the Transport abstraction layer. This greatly facilitated the testing and debugging of the migrated application and the project was finished on time and under budget.
Due to the ease of implementation and the ease in which the application could be translated, compiled and linked at will on Linux, Ford presented Sector7 with a special “Easy Button” award.
