JAM/Panther Bulletin

September 2019

Stack Overflow JAM/Panther Community

Folks, our JAM/Panther product is in its 40 ^th year. We still have hundreds of customers around the world running these applications. Some are in maintenance mode and some are still actively developing/updating their applications. Many customers have integrated their JAM/Panther applications with the web world and have given their users a whole new User Interface.

As always, our support team is here to answer questions, bug fixes etc. You may also post questions to Stack Overflow where experienced developers may share their advice with all of us.

Which PATH is best for your JAM5 application?

There are three potential paths to follow when upgrading a JAM 5 application:

• Migration
• Utility conversion
• Full upgrade

These three paths are listed in ascending order of difficulty and effectiveness. Each path encompasses the previous one, but takes it several steps further.

Migration

Migration is the fastest and most direct way to get up and running with Panther. Migration means that your application remains virtually the same and runs with JAM 5 compatibility in the Panther environment. Once migrated, you can immediately begin to use the features of Panther to extend and modify your application. Going with this route may buy you the time you need to plan a proper conversion. Experience has proven that migration works best for character-based applications, since graphical applications present more challenging issues. If you used JAM/Pi to build your application, then migration is not recommended.

Utility Conversion

Conversion is potentially a more complicated process than migration. Its goal is to map your application's functionality into Panther constructs without altering it too much. A suite of conversion utilities, including a screen conversion utility, \f5upg, are provided to perform the bulk of this mapping. Once again, character applications convert more easily than graphical applications. The appearance of your graphical application after conversion will most likely be different than it was before, so you should examine each screen carefully and manually adjust them as necessary.

Full Upgrade

Finally, you might want to fully upgrade your application to Panther. Here, your application must be extensively modified to take full advantage of the advanced features provided in Panther. At this time, fully upgrading an application is a manual process.

To learn more about the best approach, reach out to the JAM5 Migration Team at support@prolifics.com