Visual LANSA Reviews & Product Details

The simplicity of how you can move elements Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The form of how Lansa organize files, the repository have problems syncing between computer and sever Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Visual LANSA IDE is very intuitive and what you would expect in a modern development environment. I find the LANSA RDML language to be rich and easy to use. The English like syntax and the various tutorials and reference manuals enables developers to come up to speed quickly. LANSA has a proven track record of re-investing in the product so that it keeps up with the latest technology. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

WYSIWYG Editor could be improved. A "lite" version of the product for consultants would be nice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Visual Lansa has a number of bests: extremely easy to develop and maintain applications, robust source editor provides quick access to all types of objects and cross-reference their usage, data repository to encapsulate and enforce business rules ensuring data integrity, same source code runs on different platforms and operating systems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Currently have some minor issues with third party change management system. This may be due to our being at Lansa version 12 and not at the current version or third party vendor or both. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If you have a simple understanding of logic, LANSA is very easy to learn and I have been able to achieve any programming result that I have desired with a little mentoring occasionally. I have written applications for Marketing, Accounting, Claims, you name it..... It interacts well with other programs and performs well in a batch environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only thing that I dislike about Lansa is the built-in reporting feature in functions. I don't feel like there is a lot of documentation on how to get the most out of it. We write a lot of reports that run on an AS400 in Robot and I feel like there is not as much flexibility with the built in reports as there are with tools like Crystal Reports. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The amount of information that’s readily available. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The user interface is challenging to understand at first. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Visual LANSA, allowed me to be more productive, creating application software using less program code that would typically needed when developing with tradition computer programming languages, also making the integration with the legacy system very simple. Has enabled me to rapid delivery of business applications with a minimum of hand-coding. Learned it using LANSA online self-training, plus their support and expertise, the debugging tool, and all the provided practical examples. There was a minimum need to be re-skilled or have to learn a multitude of new development tools and languages. Has enabled me also to create of a new breed of enterprise-grade web and potentially mobile applications supporting the constant changing needs of the business, now faster than before. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The documentation, some times is not detailed enough Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that LANSA is always improving their product and that it is powerful enough to do nearly everything that I need it to. When there is an unusual requirement and LANSA cannot do something, it provides the ability to interface with specialty programs that can, or simply lets me generate and execute scripts on the fly that can (VBscript for instance). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Starting at Version 13 the LANSA Windows deployment tool was changed to use MSI install packages instead of their home-grown deployment technique. Since V13 I use the MSI to install the base package on user workstations but had to develop my own JIT update programs to deploy updates. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Time to deployment and reduced investment in having to always learning 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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Hang on tight with the training. It's 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, it's gold. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a manager I don't have to worry about having a mobile developer, web developer, pc developer, RPG developer, etc. I can train all my developers on LANSA and they can develop the applications on the appropriate platform needed for our company. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like for the company to bring back the LANSA user conferences. This was a great networking opportunity and place to see new or updates to tools they offer. It was also a great opportunity to speak directly to LPC. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Visual LANSA has a very important concept called a repository at its core. It allows the developer to keep track of all the development objects that are used as part of the application. The repository encourages reuse of objects, and rules and relationships can be defined over these objects. It also allows for the smooth promotion and tracking of these objects from Development through to QA and Production environments. I also like the fact that this one simple to learn language can allow a developer to deploy to windows, web and mobile. I have seen many developers over the years develop between all three. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A couple of things that I dislike. 1) There needs to be a better process of deploying Windows dll's to Citrix servers. 2) The Version Control System features would better suit my needs if it also worked as part of a slave IDE install. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.