G4 System (G4S, pronounced as “G-Force”) is Cornerstone’s 4th generation of tools and techniques for solving every imaginable software conversion problem (standardization, unifying, beautifying and normalization of complex application systems) in an automated way. The result is always improved efficiency, reduced software maintenance costs, upgraded and enhanced insight, overview, and better basis for maintenance engineers.

Whether the motive is changing from one platform to another or implementation of more flexible development languages or decreasing the Total Cost Of Ownership, G4/Migrator offers effective help. The latter is achieved by decomposing application software systems into syntactical structures, which are analyzed to derive semantics of code, structure and data. This results in complete and transparent views of the entire system, across all thinkable system relationships.

Design ‘secrets’ and undocumented features will be revealed, eliminating the reliance upon costly skilled software developers for doing maintenance work. G4 provides an addition for a platform, in which maintenance issues can be dealt with ranging from the initial language definition up to the final solution. Whether it is an application system wide analysis using G4/Repository (i.e. G4/Analysor) or the conversion of a legacy system to a 4th generation language environment through G4/Migrator, G4S will serve that purpose.

Contact Lightyear at sales@lightyr.com or 1-800-299-5230 to find out more about your options for software and or language conversion, and database migration from your existing legacy environments.

In general a conversion project which is entirely performed by tools, is comprised of: preprocessing, parsing, data extraction & uploading to a Repository, information gathering and configuring project specifics. Each phase may consist of a single step or more practically some serializations and/or parallellizations of steps.

In preprocessing, source file dependencies are checked, (macro) expanded, non-language elements are depicted, et cetera. During analysis an expanded source is decomposed into syntactical elements (‘parsed’), which are in turn transformed to language-independent information (‘pseudo code’), using Action Language statements. The system Repository is filled with the results of this process, done for all program sources and possibly JCL of an application system.

Subsequently, project specifics will be taken into account. Finally the actual conversion engine is ready to be configured and so the original sources can be converted to the new platform.