The Real Story on Reengineering:

Reengineering by Humans, not Computers

Innovatics takes great pride in providing true redesign of our clients' systems intelligently and with professional oversight.

Some of our past clients, as well as some competitors, have attempted to use automated translation tools and wrapper libraries in order to perform conversions. The idea is that legacy source code is moved "as is" from a system like PowerBuilder or VB to a more current language such as Java with relatively little programmer effort. What usually happens is that the converted system misses the mark in several ways.

You wouldn't translate Tolstoy's War and Peace from the original Russian into English using just a computer. In like manner, automated translation of computer languages sounds better than it actually works out in practice and it still requires manual intervention.

When you need to move application software between two different platforms, such as the Windows desktop, to Software as a Service (SaaS) on the web, the quality of an automatically produced "port" can be very lacking in terms of usable functionality, user convenience, and performance.

We have seen the following problems with "automatic conversions":
  • May not be easily maintained (often because the size of the human readable source code increases substantially with no gain in function)
  • Does not embody good design practices because it is a literal translation between incompatible ways of writing programs
  • Results in odd ways of using the target programming language
  • Crippled or missing functionality and lowered ease of use
Innovatics creates fresh, new Java code that does exactly what the legacy code did. But it is a truly new implementation in Java, using the best known standard Java development techniques as well as proven design patterns. This means lower maintenance costs for you throughout the lifetime of the system.

We also have deep experience in full software lifecycle development. This means that we test and verify that the new system works exactly the same as your existing system.

We preserve your initial investment to the maximum extent. Often we can reuse existing code equity such as database schemas and stored procedures, where it is possible to retain it. You are in complete control of the depth and scope of our reengineering process.

Best of all: our cost to perform such re-engineering is generally the same or even less than many of our competitors who use automated systems.

With much better results for you.

We recently released a product aimed at developers that need to incorporate PDF generating functionality in their desktop or web applications.

The product has it's own dedicated web site:

PDFjet for Java and C#


© 2008 Innovatics Inc.