Caja España: Automatic migration of the financial terminal

Project for the automatic migration of the applications that made up Caja España’s thick financial client to a new native web architecture.

This is the case of Caja España, in 2006 had to face the discontinuity of IBM VisualAge, on which all the financial applications of its financial terminal had been developed.

Caja España was faced with the important challenge of finalizing the dependence of its IBM VisualAge apps, a JAVA thick client that had been the basis of its entire financial terminal for more than 15 years. Not only that, but it also needed to provide its developers with a new IDE that would allow them to continue to maintain and evolve the app in an equivalent way, while always maintaining the bank’s day-to-day business.

Caja España trusted Xeridia to carry out this challenge. After analyzing the different options, proposed the execution of an automatic migration project that would eliminate the dependency of the existing IBM VisualAge libraries code and move from a thick client to a native web or thin client.

Automatic migration of more than 3.300 aplications.

The project involved the automatic migration of more than 3,300 applications/windows that made up the entity’s financial client and was successfully completed in a period of one year.

During this period, the new app was deployed successfully in all the offices of the Spanish entity, without any changes on their day-to-day operations. The entire migration process did not require, in any case, the intervention of the internal development teams, which were able to continue performing the activities required by the business.

Creation of a new development environment.

Xeridia also created a new Visual Java Editor for development, integrated as a plugin in Eclipse, in parallel to the automatic migration of apps, and in response to the need of these internal teams to continue with the tasks of app support and evolution.

This Editor, replicated the functionalities of IBM VisualAge, allowing the entity to continue working in the same way they had been working to date, thus minimizing the learning curve of analysts and programmers in the visual development of apps, and improving the efficiency of the team.

In addition, because of the good acceptance of the IDE developed, Xeridia deployed the solution both in Caja España’s internal teams and in all the teams and software factories of the suppliers working on the development and maintenance of the platform for the entity.

This new development environment also offered greater control over the architecture of the developed applications, since the palette of components available in the visual composition had full access control over the operations allowed to each of the developers.

This project also allowed the company to save a great deal of money, not only because it meant moving from an IBM proprietary system to a system based on open standards, but also because it eliminated the need to train internal teams in the new application, making them more efficient.

Towards a new Web Native architecture.

Once the initial migration process was successfully completed, and once the operational continuity of the bank’s financial terminal was guaranteed, a new challenge arose for the adoption of new technologies and the use of all the advantages offered by native web applications.

For this reason, Caja España trusted Xeridia to carry out a migration of the entire terminal, from a client-server-based architecture with Java/Swing, to a new Web Native architecture on HTML and AJAX, allowing communication with the server without page reloads and at the same time being more responsive.

This eliminated the need to install the financial terminal on each computer, allowing all employees to work with an installed browser, thus providing great flexibility to internal work procedures.