Aplensia
Aplensia is a company dedicated to working with the APL programming language. When the owners formed the company in 2011, the name of the company was chosen carefully to reflect this fact. The management team and the developers are all very experienced software developers.
Aplensia's Mission and Business Idea
- To work with business systems in close co-operation with the users
- To combine smart and cost-effective solutions with close business support
- To work dynamically and constantly adapt the applications to new requirements
- To provide new advanced technical solutions
- To solve very specialised problems
- To combine APL server functions with different user interfaces using browsers, windows GUI or interactive Microsoft Excel
As Aplensia's clients are all very large corporations, there is a requirement for Aplensia-developed systems to be created and maintained whilst also being integrated into much larger contexts. There are many dependencies between the solutions developed by Aplensia and the other systems implemented in the corporations. Some of these systems are highly operational.
Some of the key tasks have been the development of new Aplensia concepts and technology for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) to handle all central company data in the appropriate manner.
Aplensia's dedicated target in all development processes is to work with a highly business oriented approach to all development projects. This includes retaining, and collecting, vast know-how, and keeping a documented comprehensive knowledge base with regards to handling central business data and dependent systems.
At the Heart of Everything Aplensia Does is APL
Dyalog enables Aplensia to work with a small team, although they manage a staggering 1.5 million lines of code. With their simple, but sophisticated solutions, Aplensia prides itself in being highly responsive – and adaptive – to new customer demands. This includes continuous trimming of the applications to ensure continuous high performance. In particular, they have developed solutions around product data that are using advanced array technology in a unique way – currently not matched by anyone else in the software development space.
It is key for Aplensia to have a good, and proactive, working relationship with partners like Dyalog Ltd. In addition to APL, Aplensia also use a multitude of other tools including .NET, ASP, JavaScript, Excel-VBA, WPF and DB2.
Migration from Mainframe APL2
Traditionally, the company and the developers have worked with APL2 on IBM mainframes. By 2013 all the applications had been migrated to Dyalog under Microsoft Windows. The migrations have been completed using different approaches. The approaches used were presented at Dyalog '12.
One of the biggest challenges has been to migrate a system that cannot be "frozen" simply because a production system has to continue to be operational and is under constant change.
During the migration Aplensia developed new tools in the following areas:
- Data and code transfer
- Code migration
- Testing
- Authentication
- Service processes for batches and Excel clients
- Data storage in DFS (Dyalog File Server)
- Emulation of 3270 GDDM screen handling
Aplensia thus retains a large knowledge bank based on their experiences. This knowledge bank is made available to other software developers to help them successfully manage migration projects.
Aplensia's reference clients include: blue chip corporations such as Volvo Cars and large Swedish banking institutions
Aplensia's case studies include: Automotive – Production Schedule / Automotive – Customisation / Migration Project