The RainCode Corporation also delivers a number of services based on its strong expertise in languages and compilers. To give you a taste of what we can do, you can find here a few examples of previous projects.

• Pacbase generated-COBOL Renovation
• Ideal to COBOL Migration
• Proton World: documentation and coding standards
• Amdahl Project: web-callable CICS components generation
• Research Project: RainCode for positional languages

DVV Insurance has thousands of Pacbase programs, generating COBOL for compilation purposes. As they wanted to leave the Pacbase world, DVV asked RainCode together with Amdahl to perform the migration to COBOL. Our approach is to start with the generated COBOL code, and enhance its quality and structure by applying a sequence of passes on the source, among which:

• Cosmetic enhancements such as: systematic indentation, adding the optional reserved words (THEN, END-IF, etc.).
• Removal of unused code.
• Replacing complicated loops by natural constructs.
• Replacing GO TOs by equivalent, but structured constructs.

On the first application we renovated (about 600 programs), we recorded the following statistics:

• For 49% of the programs, all the GOTOs were removed.
• For more than 92% of the programs, less than 15% of GO TOs are remaining.
• We typically reduce the size of a program to 60-90% of its original size, in terms of number of statements.

The resulting reshaped sources are equivalent to the Pacbase sources in terms of functionality and semantics; they are shorter, better structured and way more readable.

DVV Insurance is one of the leading insurance companies in Belgium and part of Dexia, Belgium's second largest financial group. The consolidated premium income of DVV in 2001 amounted to EUR 927 million. DVV offers a full range of insurance, savings and investment products and, more than ever, emphasizes on satisfying customers by means of an effective distribution strategy which meets their needs. DVV's well developed multi-channel distribution system is based on an exclusive agents' network, bankinsurance with banks of the Dexia group, brokerage via Belstar and Luxstar, direct writing through CoronaDirect and sectoral pensions with Sepia.

This project has been achieved in collaboration with TPG, a Canadian consulting firm, for Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC). Several critical applications at PWGSC were written in IDEAL, a Computer Associates programming language, with Datacom databases. PWGSC wanted to go for a migration to COBOL with DB2. TPG took care of the database conversion, while we performed the language translation.

The RainCode technology has been chosen to carry out this translation for the process guarantees the TOTAL FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE between the initial source code and the final one. This equivalence was, of course, one of the basic requirements for this assignment. Another advantage of RainCode is that the generated COBOL code can be manipulated to comply to a specific coding style.

The RainCode technology was used in the context of a payment-card mass personalisation project for Proton World. The maintenance of this project was outsourced to Logica Belgium and Proton World. In order to facilitate further maintenance, Proton World first required the developers to observe a number of coding rules. Thanks to the RainCode Checker, we were able to verify, day by day, that these rules were respected and systematically applied. We could thus issue a compliance guarantee at the end of the project. Another requirement was to completely and accurately document the systems developed. In this case we were again able to guarantee that every element was documented as requested.

If you want to have a look on the Proton World website.

The purpose of this project was to make components out of Pacbase-generated Legacy COBOL applications. RainCode was used to characterize the pieces of the program's logic, in terms of containing business logic, persistence logic, presentation or any mix thereof, and to generate web-callable CICS components with the business logic only, so that new interfaces could be used on top of existing, highly tested code.

If you want to have a look on the Amdahl website.

The RainCode technology is based on the analysis of non positional languages such as COBOL and Java. A research project, partly financed by the Région Bruxelles Capitale, has been initiated in collaboration with the Free University of Brussels (U.L.B.) to alleviate this "restriction", and adapt the RainCode technology to positional languages such as RPG, which is widespread on the market.