Until the announcement on November 14th 2001 by Hewlett Packard, that it planned to discontinue sales and support of the HPe3000, ScreenJet developments had been aimed entirely at enhancing the user interface on the HPe3000. Those developments had already provided the tools to convert and replicate the VPlus functions.

ScreenJet CEO, Alan Yeo, said "The company will now be concentrating its efforts entirely on VPlus migration". To this end the company has also prepared a White Paper on the issues that will affect the migration of VPlus based applications. The paper is aimed at anyone who has to consider migration, and attempts to cover the issues that will be faced regardless of the route or tools they choose. Go to White Papers to read the paper.

ScreenJet Ltd has subsequently announced a series of tools to automate and assist with the migration of VPlus applications. The tools which leverage on the expertise gained in developing the current ScreenJet™ VPlus GUI product, provide multiple conversion options.

Uniquely the ScreenJet tools will allow the automatic conversion and optional further enhancement of the user interface whilst the applications are still running on the HPe3000. This makes ScreenJet ideal for those who intend to remain using the HPe3000 for the foreseeable future, as well as those looking for a faster migration.

Conversion options are then provided for several ACUCOBOL™-GT, formats. Other formats such as XML & XHTML may also be available. ScreenJet is also launching a revised version of its VPlus Intercept API that will allow applications to optionally retain their existing VPlus screen handling calls and procedures.

For users converting to ACUCOBOL-GT the ScreenJet tools can convert either the original VPlus forms, or those already enhanced to a Windows GUI by ScreenJet directly into the AcuBench™ formats. This will enable HPe3000 applications thus migrated to benefit from the full ACUCOBOL-GT development and deployment options. The ScreenJet VPlus API will also be available in ACUCOBOL-GT, thus optionally providing further ease of portability to any of the 600 platforms that ACUCOBOL-GT can be deployed on.

ACUCOBOL-GT would seem to be one of the natural migration options for those applications written in HP COBOLII as Acucorp has recently released Version 5.2.2 of its extend™ 5 product line on the HPe3000. This release will provide support for HP COBOL language extensions and HP Intrinsics, thereby providing direct access to Image and many other third party offerings.