Visual LANSA

RATING:

4.6

(19)

About Visual LANSA

Visual LANSA is an integrated development environment (IDE) that allows users to develop and maintain cloud-based and desktop applications. Key features include application generation wizards, SQL support, data modeling and integrated compilers. Deployment options include Windows, IBM i and Linux, as well as cloud-based deployment. Users can create cross-platform software through LANSA’s RDML (rapid development and maintenance language) and independent metadata repository. Leveraging LANSA’s portable metadata repository, users can create an application with access to JDBC, IBM i and ODBC- compliant databases. Developers can work with field and file definitions, validations, relationships and components stored in the metadata repository from one screen for web,...
Resource applications

Visual LANSA Reviews

Overall Rating

4.6

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

4

Customer Support

4.5

Value for money

4

Functionality

4.5

Most Helpful Reviews for Visual LANSA

1 - 5 of 19 Reviews

User Profile

Jon

Verified reviewer

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed June 2018

Lansa changed my whole development cycle

We use Lansa for all new development ranging from iSeries green screens to Windows native to cross-browser web development to Mobile. It has turned staffs of mixed talent to single cohesive teams.

PROS

Time to deployment and reduced investment in having to always learn new skills to keep up. Historically, as interesting as it is for developers to learn new tech and find ways to engage the user and make things easier, this learning curve is time consuming and costly. It also does not insure consistency from developer to developer or adherence to standards. Lansa literally removes all of that. The developer is extracted from that layer and only has to focus on a single development environment that continues to improve and present simple ways to accomplish the latest technologies. It even insures adherence to standards through its common repository and wizards to create many of the most common processes. To take this whole picture to the next level, all of the code is portable, not only from system to system, but between OSs! If your company is using an iSeries and decides that it is time to move to another platform; you can move with it. No new learning curves. No re-development. Pick it up and move it over. I can't emphasize enough how valuable these traits are in environments that do not have the luxury of time and money to continually retrain.

CONS

Hang on tight with the training. Its important and well worth it in the end. But it is easy to get bored with. I find documentation to be sufficient if you have the basis of the training. Once you are through that and understand the concepts and the language, its gold.

steve

Libraries, 51-200 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

4

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed February 2020

20+ years and it's never let me down

exceptional. i've said many times "if you can't do it in Lansa, you probably don't need to do it." (at least in a business application - you won't write an image processor or a protein sequence analysis program but you can probably integrate with the back end data.) the recent acquisition by Idera has given some pause to the community (there were a flurry of exits from long-timers as well) but so far it seems to be working out.

PROS

it's not just the software - it's the entire Lansa ecosystem. been using it for over 20 years and it is hands down, the best business software development platform (especially for the IBMi) i've ever dealt with. it's flexible, intuitive, and can do make integration easy and FAST. (side by side, doing something in Lansa vs develop something in RPG or COBOL is 2-3x as fast and 10x more intuitive). in the 20 years, it has always been able to keep up with what needs to be done in the business (and i've seen the product evolved from a green screen, SEU/PDM like interface to one that you can develop robust windows, web, and mobile apps with).

CONS

IDE can be a bit slow (especially when you've just started it) and is a few steps behind a visual studio type interface.

Reason for choosing Visual LANSA

every shop i've worked in was Lansa (and green screen) before i got there. options considered included Synon, RPG, and COBOL. and in each case, Lansa was selected because of the ability to ramp up, be productive, and "get stuff done" very quickly.

Vendor Response

Steve, Wow! It is really great to hear how Visual LANSA has been a reliable solution for you for over 20 years. Thank you for sharing your feedback on the IDE. We are always looking for ways to improve our product.

Replied February 2020

Robert

Media Production, 10,000+ employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

4

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed February 2020

Order Entry Platform for 18 Years

Ultimately satisfied our business and user needs.

PROS

Satisfied our order entry GUI needs for our entire enterprise for over 18 years, and still going.

CONS

Ultimately we needed stronger integration and easier deployment options, and are slowly phasing out our LANSA GUI.

Vendor Response

Robert, How great to hear Visual LANSA has been solid for you for 18 years! Are you on our latest version? 14 SP2 is geared toward easy integration and deployment. Even be on the lookout for some updated features to your concerns really soon.

Replied March 2020

Benzy

Legal Services, 201-500 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed February 2020

Best Low Code Development Software in the Market

Used Lansa tools to solve new and or existing business flows and logic. Used Lansa to switch over from various legacy systems (G/L, order entry, sales etc...). Back a few years we also used Lansa Integrator to interface with Lotus Notes database to create a uniform experience - which including using the data between the two platforms for web applications.

PROS

Reusable code. Really, reusable code. Write once and rules follow the data around without the need to re-code depending on the interface. Transparent enforcement of the business rules and logic. Can write as granular as needed for your specific requirements. Once that has been accomplished you can concentrate on UI design and coding.

CONS

To many ways to skin a cat with the options to tackle problems. It's great working with various interfaces but sometimes there is limited (or no) documentation to those interfaces (such as when MS released Office 16, little information avaliable to access Excel .net newer features).

Reason for choosing Visual LANSA

Easier to understand how to code with the Lansa tools than other products. Could use existing talent to create richer applications without having to learn new skills.

Reasons for switching to Visual LANSA

Needed a seamless environment. Needed control of features for the end user and ability change requirement that external stakeholders required of the legal industry. Plus needed something to pave the way for future enhancements. We knew we had to be able to integrate with the internet, Lotus Notes, the court systems, PayPal. Also needed to get away from green screen and work with GUI interfaces as well as some standard desktop software.

Vendor Response

Benzy, We are thrilled Visual LANSA is making a positive impact on your application development process! We are working hard to address our issues with limited documentation. We have some exciting improvements coming in the near future!

Replied February 2020

Joe

Staffing and Recruiting, 201-500 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed July 2017

Reduces technical baggage and allows you to focus on solving business problems

By reducing the amount of technical baggage typically associated with web development, the time from conception to production is radically reduced. This also means that I can focus significantly more of my effort on solving business problems then solving technology problems.

PROS

I thing I like the most is being able to leave the technical baggage behind and really focus on solving problems for the company. For example, a full stack developer has a host of technologies they have to master to be effective and efficient at their job. If you are developing modern, responsive web applications chances are you are using something along the lines of Angular, React, Ember etc. Besides being yet another thing to know, it brings compilation, packing and deployment issues to the front-end development process. I don't worry about this any more. I develop a component and Visual LANSA handles the compilation, packing and deploying it to the browser for me. On the back-end side you have other frameworks to know. You've got to handle requests with WebAPI, MVC or Spring etc. You have to handle data access with Entity Framework, JPA, Hibernate etc. Then you may have an IoC container bringing everything together. With Visual LANSA Server Modules handle the request and you have just a handful of commands to interact with the database. All of the underlying plumbing that you normally have to deal with is removed as Visual LANSA takes care of it. One last thing that is really nice is the Visual LANSA Framework. If you are doing back office web development, i.e. not consumer facing, then the "Framework" becomes a huge time saver. Its essentially a "Shell" that you plug your components into and it handles all the complexities of the UI for you.

CONS

The thing I like the least is the debugger. The debuggers in Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Chrome's Dev Tools etc, set pretty high expectations and this where I think Visual LANSA could use the most help. Performance when debugging web components is pretty poor. Debugging non-JavaScript based objects like Server Modules, Functions, Windows Forms etc. is good. It's just JavaScript based components that seem to bog down and make stepping through code a very time consuming process. One example is not being able to inspect the contents of a list. You can see how many entries are in it, but you cannot see those entries without iterating the list. This typically leads to a lot of trace messages and essentially debugging through tracing.