Anubex awarded research grant from Belgian government

Anubex, leader in automated application modernization is pleased to announce it has won a science and technology research grant from the Belgian government. The grant has been awarded for Anubex’ work designing a pluggable architecture migration tool prototype. The prototype represents a significant step forward for the configurability of application modernization to suit individual customer requirements.

The value of the award is €90k and partially covers the research and development executed by a group within Anubex focusing on client/server modernization. The pluggable architecture prototype will find its first industrial application in VB NETamorpher, a new tool from Anubex that targets VB6 application migrations to .NET.  

With the new architecture, all conversion rules that match the source technology to its target are implemented in the form of plug-ins. These plug-ins are small programs that get loaded into the host migration tool and invoked whenever the rule is fired. The new design makes it possible to extend and parameterize a tool to fit specific customer needs.

The plug-ins can also be generated automatically, which eliminates much of the burden for developers to design plug-ins for third-party libraries that are complex or large in size. Writing a plug-in manually that fully covers the conversion rules for such components can be time consuming and error-prone. To address this issue, the architecture provides support for code generation, whereby large portions of the plug-ins are created automatically.  

“The pluggable architecture has certainly proven to be a good fit for Visual Basic 6 to .NET migration”, says Kris Ceuppens, director of client/server modernization at Anubex. “The notion of component based development is one of the cornerstones of the VB6 culture that encouraged developers to enrich their applications with third-party libraries. These developers had access to an unprecedented number of networks that made it easy to make and exchange reusable components.”

VB6 is one of several pre-.NET technology platforms with an avid component-based development following. On the roadmap for future applications of the pluggable architecture within Anubex are new tools targeting languages such as Delphi, WinDev and other rapid application development environments.

About IWT

The agency for Innovation through Science and Technology was founded in 1991. The government agency supports innovation in Flanders in various ways. 

About Anubex

Anubex provides solutions for the modernization of large and complex legacy applications for business and government organizations alike.
Anubex exclusively applies a proven methodology and specialized software to optimally re-use the value in existing applications while automatically transforming them to use the most leading-edge technologies.

Several of its customers are ranked among the Fortune Global 500. Anubex was incorporated in 1988 and is headquartered in Antwerp (Belgium) with an office in Sacramento (USA).