Business Benefits

Analyzer Express provides rapid access to application analysis via Integrated Development Environments.

Analyzer Express gives developers insight into their applications through quick access to a library of reports, diagrams, and queries. This information allows developers to quickly understand the structure of their applications, identify potential impacts from proposed changes, and efficiently locate elements of interest in their code. And because the module is built on the Eclipse framework, users can directly access Analyzer Express from within many popular integrated development environments.

Analyzer Express is an integrated module of the Modernization Workbench® platform. Its analysis capabilities provide:

Rapid Application Understanding

Analyzer Express generates diagrams of the structure and flow of applications, allowing developers to quickly get 'up-to-speed' on the nature of their applications. The wide variety of interactive views provide developers with reports on application artifact interrelationships, a contextualized view of how elements fit into the application as a whole, and flow charts and call maps that illustrate the behavior of the application. This information can be easily shared with colleagues through reports based on common office standards.

In addition to understanding an application, it is important that developers know how a proposed change will affect the rest of the application. Analyzer Express's impact analysis perspective provides this functionality. The capability efficiently uncovers which elements will be affected by a modification to the code, allowing developers to ask 'what-if' type questions, limiting the risk of disrupting critical applications.

Analyzer Express also delivers a flexible, customizable querying engine that allows developers to richly probe their applications to locate and understand elements of interest. The technology includes a library of pre-built queries to help developers locate numerous common items of interest, such as non-standard code or dead code. Users can also build and store their own queries using the intuitive query wizard. Newly built queries can be stored and reused by colleagues to ease common searches.

Integration with the Eclipse Framework

Analyzer Express is built on the ubiquitous Eclipse framework. As a result, the module can be plugged into any compliant development environment to provide an application analysis perspective. This allows developers to analyze the sources they are currently enhancing and quickly shift back to their synchronized code editing perspective -- all in one tool. The benefits are still more pronounced in conjunction with WebSphere Developer for zSeries®. Through this combination, users can perform analysis directly on sources on the mainframe, further ensuring consistency of results and supporting the application development lifecycle.

Integration with the Modernization Workbench Platform

While Analyzer Express addresses many core analysis activities, there are frequently tasks that require the additional functionality that the Modernization Workbench provides. Analyzer Express leverages the same always-current, standards-based repository as the Modernization Workbench. As a result, users can simply launch the Modernization Workbench platform as needed and perform more detailed analyses and initiatives using the same foundation of information. Users can readily switch to Application Analyzer to conduct more thorough analysis.