Serving the fast paced financial services industry, our character based (legacy) application was looking dated compared to most of our competition. Also, newer prospects demanded a Windows® GUI interface to even be considered as a viable vendor. Our staff devoted considerable time searching for a product that would allow us to provide a Windows GUI ‘front end’ to our application that would not require us to rewrite our code. We studied several terminal emulators that claim to provide screen revamping (none of them had any sparkle and looked like an interim step) and we even looked very favorably towards providing a browser based interface. But this too had some serious shortcomings. Quite by chance one day while looking through a technical magazine (the Perl Journal) I came across a very small advertisement for a product called WinFAST™ that claimed to provide a GUI interface for legacy systems. Immediately I contacted the company via the Internet and the very next day I received my trial program CD-ROM. Without hesitation I quickly installed the evaluation and began my investigation into the claims of this product. What I saw was quite promising. The product achieves its marvel by emulating a terminal to the host computer but it scans the screen images and, based on my own definitions, identifies strings and values and dynamically generates a true 32-bit Windows GUI panel. The results are astounding. The screens look just like Windows because they are Windows. They work just like Windows because they are Windows. They even allow the dynamic generation of drop down lists allowing the user to select items. You can define the colors, the font style, the width of the borders, etc., etc., etc. Without doubt I had finally found the product we needed. As with all new implementations there was a learning curve. However, if one wishes to use the screen defaults it is entirely possible to provide a Windows GUI front end to your application in less than one working day. Imagine, not months or even weeks to rewrite user interfaces; just a day! However, once we became comfortable with the workings of the WinFAST™ product we decided to take advantage of all that it could do. We began adding minor enhancements to our applications that would be interpreted by WinFAST™ to dynamically generate even more features. Features like menus, function buttons, page buttons, scrolling lists and more. And of equal importance was the technical support we experienced for this product. Questions were answered very quickly and suggestions were made as to how we could accomplish various things. The technical staff was always attentive, they know their product and they stand behind it. It is a rare combination these days when one can obtain a product as robust as WinFAST™ AND have the support to back it up.

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