LANSA (development environment)

LANSA is an integrated development environment (IDE) for building desktop, web and mobile software applications that can be deployed to Cloud, Windows, Linux and IBM i server platforms.

The main feature of the LANSA environment is the ‘RDML / RDMLX’ language–which is classified as a 4GL (4th generation language).

RDML closely follows the syntax of IBM CL, or Control Language.

CL is the “scripting language” equivalent of the OS/400 operating system.

In recent years RDML has been extended to become RDMLX.

This new version of the language has extra features, commands, types, and functions that are used in component development.

RDML, on Microsoft Windows, integrates with ActiveX.

In its first release in 1987, the product was called lambda.

At that time, solutions developed with RDML could be deployed to IBM S/38 and from 1988 onwards to the IBM AS/400 (iSeries, System i, now IBM i).

Since 1992 LANSA has been deployed to multiple server platforms, including IBM i, Windows, Linux, OS/2 and Unix.