Lansa Inc. has upgraded its cross-platform application development and integration suite to provide application modernization, integration and extension capabilities for development teams and ISVs working on multiple platforms.

The Downers Grove, Ill., enterprise application development and integration software maker unveiled Lansa 2005 at last week's Common IT Education Conference & Expo in Chicago.

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Brian Sterrett, vice president of Lansa, said there are many improvements to Lansa 2005. The entire suite of application development and integration tools has been synchronized and integrated, Sterrett said.

The suite also has an n-tier architecture that supports componentized development, and it features enhanced support for Web services and SOA (service-oriented architecture).

"We see Web services as an important trend, and we're enabling third-party developers using Java and .Net to build Web services," Sterrett said. "We've made it easy and removed any proprietary tags. So every application out of Lansa 2005 is automatically enabled as a Web service."

Lee Paul, CEO of Surround Technologies LLC, a Bloomfield, N.J., ISV, said one customer, United Consumer Financial Services, in Westlake, Ohio, is looking for Web services support for UCFS field personnel who use Pocket PCs. Paul said the new Lansa offering is key to his company producing such solutions.

Lansa also announced new support for creating applications for various targets, including Windows, Web services and a host of devices, through its TSP (Technology Service Provider) architecture. Sterrett described TSP as a layer of technology, based on XML and XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), that separates the presentation layer from the application logic.

Also improved is the Lansa 2005 IDE (integrated development environment), which includes a set of code assistants, wizards and screen painting capabilities to make for a more intuitive user experience, Sterrett said.

Surround's Paul said Lansa stands out because of the IDE enhancements and the APIs "because we have tools that sit on top of the Lansa APIs."

Sterrett said Lansa 2005 has been optimized for IBM midrange systems and for HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, Linux and Windows. The product features native IBM iSeries integration and repository-based development. Lansa 2005 will likely be available late next month, Sterrett said.

This article was first published on eweek.com.