SmartArrays, Inc. has established a professional services practice to help companies deal with legacy applications written in the APL language. We understand that it is difficult to find APL programmers today and that APL is not considered a mainstream technology.  Yet, many companies still have APL applications that perform critical functions but that are hard to maintain and administer. Often these embody sophisticated capabilities that are hard to reverse engineer, since APL is notoriously difficult to decipher without specialized expertise.

The modernization team at SmartArrays is uniquely qualified to assist and guide your development team through an APL modernization process. We can help to leverage your existing intellectual content and redesign your applications to fit current user needs and your current or future IT architecture.

Here’s why:

• We know APL’s innermost workings. Our founders built two of the world’s most widely used APL interpreters at IBM and STSC/Manugistics.
• We have up to date experience in today’s software platforms: .NET and Java. We have built enterprise level web applications on these platforms using Java, C# and C++.
• We can maintain and/or add small changes to existing APL applications during the modernization process.
• We have developed a software programming tool kit which can be used to provide array processing power comparable to APL while using standard languages like Java and C#.
• We understand the demands of working within a large corporate IT Architecture. We have completed several successful modernization projects at major corporations to transition from APL to current technology. See these case studies
• We have years of experience working with internal programming teams, so that our expertise is shared with the group and the new system is owned by the internal IT staff.

Here’s how we work:

• We examine your APL application portfolio and recommend the most cost-effective strategy.  This includes how to mine the intellectual content, how to maintain the systems during modernization, which languages to use and the appropriate deployment forms, from web services (SOA) to desktop.
• We jointly develop and implement a modernization plan with your staff. Our professionals may serve as consultants to interpret old APL. They may do maintenance work. They may write and implement the new systems. They will complement the skills of your existing staff.
• We evaluate whether our Software Development Kit (SDK) can play a role and recommend its use when appropriate. We guarantee that the new application will fit your existing IT architecture.
• Finally, we help to retire your APL applications, archiving APL2 workspaces and business data, decommissioning scheduled jobs, etc.

If modernizing an APL system is on your project list, then please contact us. We can help to bring your legacy APL applications into the modern world quickly, professionally and at a very reasonable cost.

SmartArrays technology incorporates array concepts and a suite of array operations that are a superset of those in APL. As a result, nearly any APL operation can be coded in a standard language using SmartArrays and execute in a modern IT environment.

To help with the conversion process, we have developed the SmartArrays APL Translator. The Translator is written in APL, and converts APL functions to computationally equivalent C++, C#, or Java functions using SmartArrays for the array operations. All of the standard ISO APL array operations and nearly all of the second-generation features of APL2, including nested arrays, can be translated.

The output of the translator provides a good "first draft" for converting the computational core of an APL application to a new language. Futher refinement is almost always required, however, to replace APL-style I/O and user interfaces with the appropriate facilities of modern platforms.

Because the SmartArrays APL Translator is only a part of the solution, we do not offer it as a separate software product. Where appropriate, we make it available to licensees of SmartArrays technology to aid in their APL conversion projects. Contact us for more information.