Learn how easy it has become to develop applications for and code on the HPE NonStop software stack using integrations and plugs with the various open and standard development tools and technologies.
By Vikas Kapoor, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, HPC, AI & Labs
The home improvement analogy
Let’s talk about reality television for a minute. Specifically, home improvement shows. While each highlights dynamic homeowner priorities, viewed as a group the content is almost always the same. There’s the call for an open floor plan, line of sight connecting all living areas, and new, high-end, shiny, stainless-steel appliances.
How does this connect to IT? Stick with me here. In homes, open plans lift restrictions on usage, line of sight provides homeowners opportunities to participate in a more intimate manner even as it allows them to monitor children’s activities. And appliances? They’re not so much about reduced future maintenance, but modernization.
The attributes we’re talking about here define modern homes and reflect current homeowner aspirations. When it comes to enterprise IT, modernization concerns that began before the global pandemic continue as the pandemic’s aftereffects linger. Enterprises recognize their lines of business needed more rapid responses to changing corporate requirements and that former program development models were no longer up to the task.
Here’s where we get to it: there are countless opinions about what defines modernization of the development environment, and they closely mirror that of the homeowners. In many ways, IT development wants to leverage open technologies as much as possible even as they want connectivity to every corner of the enterprise and beyond. Above all, when it comes to enterprise IT, software development modernization attracts the most attention.
“A perception of what it means to be modern is deeply embedded in the mindset of IT professionals today,” says Sridhar Neelakantan, NonStop product manager responsible for middleware, languages and tools. “NonStop development priorities and innovations have ensured that software developers have all the tools and utilities at hand that they would expect to find on any modern, connected, platform. Comparing the modernization taking place across NonStop development with that of home building may be unusual but IT is as much influenced by market expectations as is the home building industry.”
Continued investments in capabilities together with the advances that provide innovative approaches to addressing the need for more rapid modernization are hard to ignore. HPE investments are making NonStop even more relevant and better suited to driving change within the enterprise. With enterprises increasingly operating 24x7, availability remains important and NonStop continues to be the dominant fault tolerant platform. Modernization of NonStop is making sure that crucial middleware components widely accepted by software developers can be leveraged when developing applications for or writing code on HPE NonStop systems.
HPE NonStop modernization story
In environments where continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) is practiced, there is now no practical limitations to what can be implemented on NonStop systems. A review of the tools and software available today for any developer working on NonStop will go a long way to substantiate the successful modernization of the development environment for NonStop and all that is deployed on it.
Modern home architecture is a design and construction style that emphasizes function and a streamlined form over anything purely decorative. This is how contemporary IT development organizations operate.
When combined with the ability to pull new applications together from material sourced from myriad locations, improved business functionality can appear rapidly. Subroutines, code stubs and utilities; they all play a role in making new applications appear almost on demand and for the NonStop community it is not just about building new modern applications as it is modernizing much of what is already supporting the enterprises’ mission critical operations.
And then we have the software developer of today who is shunning previous software/application development models. Labor intensive, often convoluted and tied to proprietary tools, and where development is steeped in crafting everything from scratch no longer provide value for the enterprise. It is now all about productivity gained through portability of skillsets and in capitalizing on knowledge already gained that is expected to be carried over to every other platform chosen by the enterprise. It is no surprise then, to read that, enterprises will ignore platforms where these entrenched skillsets cannot be leveraged.
A quick look at what is available today for IT developers will reveal just how large an investment HPE has made in NonStop. Capable of supporting mission critical, real-time applications HPE differentiates NonStop, even as it supplements and strengthens a NonStop presence in “as-a-Service” offerings, including it as an important constituent of the HPE GreenLake initiative. However, what exactly are the elements that are contributing most to the modernization of NonStop?
The most potent combination: development languages and Java ecosystem
For many years now there have been the same four languages that continually occupied the top four positions in IT developers’ preferences. These languages include C, C++, Java and Python where runtime environments exist for each to run on NonStop. When it comes to C / C++, NonStop also offers a modern and standards compliant compiler such that it excels in support of mission critical applications. It has been a journey that has required numerous refreshes and updates but at the most elemental level, outside of those evangelizing No-Code and Low-Code, nothing happens today without first choosing a robust programming language.
“Python and Java have been the subject of considerable development effort by the NonStop team,” says Mr. Neelakantan. “NonStop has been offering Python 3 as part of its L-Series software bundle and aims to continue being open and standards driven to better provide the best programming tools essential to develop state-of-the-art, mission critical applications.”
The Java ecosystem on NonStop has matured to the point where there is little left that isn’t supported on NonStop. This in turn has led to a significant reduction in time and effort when developing applications targeting NonStop. Whether the Java-based application needs to access data held within Enscribe or the new NonStop In-Memory Cache (NSIMC) with provision for Redis together with NonStop SQL/MX among the many supported data types on offer, the workload of the Java programmer has been considerably streamlined. All the while, the NonStop architecture fundamentals of “shared nothing” are not compromised, an advantage no other platform provides out-of-the-box.
There are many more capabilities afforded to the Java programmer today including APIs in support of extreme transaction integrity (externalized from TMF as Java Transaction APIs, JTA), data persistence via the Java Persistence API (JPA) and the Hibernate dialect for the SQL/MX. For the C and C++ programmer there are even mechanisms that make it easy to implement Process-Pairs that further contribute to applications running 24 x 7. The Fault Tolerant Interface (NSFTI) takes care of the NonStop specific API calls and bindings that will uplift any ordinary C / C++ application to become a Process-Pair considered by IT professionals as the highest level of availability attained through software programming.
Modern application development and management
If choosing the language most appropriate for use by enterprise software developers is the first step to be taken, then the next step is to embrace DevOps. This has been the practice of many NonStop development teams, including those development teams within the NonStop vendor community.
HPE has been providing a reference CI/CD implementation for some of the NonStop products using Ansible with more NonStop products to be supported in this manner in the near future. The availability of the top-ranked languages and the opportunity to embrace CI/CD has been done with the objective of attracting even more applications to NonStop.
Developers no longer need to be concerned over the perceived intricacies of programming to a fault tolerant paradigm but rather, all they need to be concerned about is their own programming efforts. Everything else will be looked after on their behalf! Together, Pathsockets and NSJI libraries provided by the NonStop team help create TS/MP Serverclass applications without needing to know the specific APIs that make such applications special – the former for C/C++ and the latter for building Java based applications. Enabling this modern approach to programming ensures software developers can achieve scalable applications that are continuously available without knowing much about NonStop internals.
Finally, when committed to developing modern applications, or maintaining your traditional applications for NonStop there is a need to manage your source, objects, configuration, and production scripts and data and this requirement can be readily satisfied given the presence of Git and HPE NSGit.
What this support are the artifacts – including the more NonStop native Guardian files and Enscribe records as well as the OSS files – to be stored, version controlled, transported, and retrieved seamlessly from the Git.
“This greatly encourages developers to use Git as their universal source code maintenance system whether they are working with OSS or Guardian or a platform completely different from NonStop,” says Neelakantan. “You can readily integrate HPE NSGit and thus, your application code, with the modern DevOps enablers such as Ansible, Jenkins etc. to increase the efficiency that comes with using CI / CD principles.”
The final touches on our “house”
Infrastructure, middleware, and the foundations of any application have become the focus of many vendors’ investments in the pursuit of improved productivity. HPE’s decision to innovate all aspects of NonStop to ensure its modernity and indeed its acceptance in the face of any latent or former perceptions is a testament to HPE’s appreciation of the vital role NonStop systems play in many enterprises. Delivering as extensive a suite of modernization elements as is now available for NonStop ensures productivity gains made elsewhere in IT carry over onto NonStop.
However, this is a continuous journey with new ideas being transcribed into products almost daily. Recognizing a home as being modern may be the substance of television program today but in the real world of IT, it has become even easier to recognize just how modern NonStop has become. To put an even simpler spin on this, there are now no impediments remaining that would prevent any enterprise from deploying its next mission critical application on NonStop.
Excited by the above content? Learn about the latest strides in Application Modernization, a live, hands-on demo and talk to experts who are making these innovations – at the annual HPE NonStop premiere customer event, NonStop Technical Boot Camp, TBC 2022. Register for this event if you haven’t already and get to know the latest and greatest with HPE NonStop.
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