This is a portion of a review of an interface system I designed and wrote allowing automatic interfaces of transaction and master file
data from CW Direct and PKMS on an AS400 to/from Lawson’s accounting system running on a network server utilizing Message
Queues and, HTML documents to interface iSeries applications and ASCII data files for server applications. This technical review was
performed as part of the system acceptance process in January, 2008 by a senior member of a client’s technical staff.
….The programs written by Joe (Mauro) are some of the highest quality that I have seen. His many years experience and working
relationship with IBM have enabled him to use some of the latest coding techniques that are available in the current release of the
operating system and to utilize some IBM API’s that many programmers may not even be aware of. His many, many programs are well
documented and easy to follow. There is no hard coding and he has created an interactive system table application that can be used
to maintain almost any new or existing tables for the Lawson interfaces or any other uses. It even has the ability to create customized
menus for the business users so that they can perform maintenance on their own tables such as country codes, terms and state
codes without having to rely on IT. In most cases, he has followed the naming standards and templates that were given to him.
He has created many generic utility programs and template generators that allow for easy parsing and creating of delimitated files as
well as the creating of and extracting data from XML files. He has automated the process of moving data files through the IFS and
rerouting messages to alternate message queues which can be easily be changed when we switch from development servers to
production servers through the interactive system table. These utility programs were designed with the assumption that they could be
used with other facets of the conversion project.
All of the Lawson jobs have been set up to run automatically at predetermined times which are maintained through the table system or
can be manually submitted through the menu system. His designs also allows for exception handling so that if the system fails, data
will not be lost and prevents reprocessing of any files by using date and time stamps. It also cleans up after itself by clearing
processed files and archives files for a specified amount of time that can be modified by a table entry. If a job fails, an email is
automatically generated and sent to a list of users (maintained in the system table) along with the error messages. The email is sent
utilizing JAVA Mail accessed directly from an RPGLE utility.
There are many more features of Joe’s programming that could benefit the balance of this conversion project, but will take some to
time to fully understand. Personally, I find it hard to believe that Joe accomplished so much work in the short time he has been here.
| Joseph C. Mauro Client Testimonial |
