SAS AF still alive

[AlexeyS]

Hi,

I have a system that was built on SAS/AF, Desktop GUI app, that was consist of a lot of different frames. Now we want to improve the system, and the questions i want to ask you are :

1.  Is it worth maintaining and developing a new product based on SAS/AF?

2. If not, what can you recommend me instead? We want to create an app that contains a lot of frames, but the language behind the connection between frames and analytics are still SAS?

Thank you

[AllanBowe]

Hi @AlexeyS,

You have a piece of SAS history!  The migration path for SAS/AF is basically, SAS-Powered web apps.  Use HTML / CSS / Javscript for the frames (frontend) and regular SAS code for the backend, to replace the SCL.

This gives you the best of both worlds:

* SAS for data manipulation and providing the secure platform

* Web for the interfaces and functionality, working on multiple browsers and screen sizes

My team specialise this in this kind of work (AF Modernisation) and we have plenty of advice:

* Use a framework!  This will speed up the delivery and the end result will be more maintainable

* Seperate the frontend and backend (much easier to find pure SAS and pure JS developers than resources who can do both)

* Use GIT and DevOps from the start

* Write tests

* Write documentation

Beyond advice, we also offer a framework (SASjs).  This lets you build on ANY version of SAS (eg Base SAS) and deploy to any other (eg Viya).  It includes plugins for testing, documentation, deployment as part of a GIT pipeline, and best of all - it's totally free / open source.

We also have some other tricks up our sleeve, if you'd like to talk further:

* SCL Migration Kit - if you have lots of SCL, we have an fcmp library that will let you re-use your logic in Base SAS 95% unchanged

* Data Controller for SAS - this is an off-the-shelf solution for manual data entry with double helpings of data quality / audit trail / validations. 

Further resources:

* https://slides.com/allanbowe/sasaf

* https://sasapps.io/modernising-legacy-sas-scl-af-applications

* https://rawsas.com/slists-scl-lists-an-overview/

* https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/easy-af-scl-modernisation-html5-sas-allan-bowe

[SASKiwi]

SAS/AF's biggest negative is that it requires a full Foundatation SAS 9.4 installation to run on. It's also a legacy product that will not see any further significant enhancements. SAS 9.4 itself only has full support from SAS until the end of 2025 although I suspect that could be extended. SAS Viya is the way forward and @AllanBowe 's recommendations make a lot of sense.

[andreas_lds]

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@SASKiwi wrote:

SAS/AF's biggest negative is that it requires a full Foundatation SAS 9.4 installation to run on. It's also a legacy product that will not see any further significant enhancements. SAS 9.4 itself only has full support from SAS until the end of 2025 although I suspect that could be extended. SAS Viya is the way forward and @AllanBowe 's recommendations make a lot of sense.

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Why only until 2025? I thought that with the release of 9.4m8 in October we get full five years again.