A sneak peek at new Caristix technology
A few weeks ago, we published an article on the cost of interfaces. We’ve also ranted a little, and you — readers here, on LinkedIn, and elsewhere — responded with a great discussion. A big area where interfaces cost way too much: migrating from a legacy interface engine to newer engine technology.
Imagine what you could do if you could remove the manual work.
Well, we’re putting our money where our mouth is. We’re developing a series of converters to do this work. Here’s a sneak peek at this technology.
What’s a converter?
A Caristix converter converts an interface from one engine to another, in order to support interface engine migration. We picked on engine migrations because many provider organizations are finding that older technology no longer fits their needs and they’ve launched migration or conversion projects.
We started working on converters after several customers came to us. They told us, we have your connectors, and they’re saving us a lot of programming time. Can we use the connectors to migrate our interfaces?
First, most developers agree that converting or migrating an interface (or changing out interface engines) is complex work. Each engine has its own language, concepts, and objects, and an interface coded in one engine doesn’t translate or convert easily into another. Second, the connectors we’ve been designing are meant to pull data into Caristix software and push schemas or message definitions into engines such as Rhapsody and Ensemble. That’s a good start, but we thought we could push this quite a bit further by not only taking care of message schemas (profiles) but the interface as a whole.
So we had to come up with something new, and that’s when the converter was born. The Caristix converter reads the interface configuration in one engine, and outputs it in the new engine format, transforming all interface attributes. Our converter does the bulk of the work, but leaves the thinking to the developer or analyst. For instance, the converter doesn’t translate any code. Based on our experience, one-to-one code translation is not ideal as programming languages all have their own specifics, making code translation a huge technical challenge. Each engine has its own specifics, too. So we adopted a different strategy.
We thought the converter should take care of boring tasks, creating the interface and converting the interface attributes to the new engine while letting you, the developer, work with the fun stuff: more complex coding.
How does a Caristix converter help?
Analysts and developers will spend time generating the basic interface but will save hours in the process. Project managers and team leaders can count on kicking projects out faster and using their existing resources efficiently.
Who should consider using the Caristix converter?
Anyone who’s migrating from one engine to another.
What does Caristix have now?
We’ve started with a prototype of a Mirth-Iguana converter. This is what it looks like:
Contact us at info@caristix.com to learn more about the prototype and ask about joining a beta.
And let us know what you think of the converter idea in the comments below.