An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
Via its open-source project OpenRewrite, Moderne offers automated code refactoring and analysis across teams, applications, and languages, helping to resolve code quality issues and migrate and upgrade older frameworks and libraries.
While OpenRewrite offers refactoring for smaller codebases, Moderne’s commercial offering provides adequate scalability and support for multiple Git repos for even the most massive and intractable codebases.
Under the covers, OpenRewrite creates an abstract syntax tree that represents all the information about a codebase available to the compiler. Based on this information, developers can create ‘recipes’ or scripts that tackle individual refactoring tasks, for example, upgrading from one version of Spring Boot to the next.
Developers can then stack recipes to create complex refactoring processes that can modernize broad swaths of the enterprise application landscape – rather than modernizing one application at a time as competing products do.
Moderne leverages LLMs to provide natural language prompts. Unlike other generative AI deployments, however, Moderne’s recipes are fully deterministic, thus eliminating hallucinations and delivering repeatability and consistency across deployments.
Moderne provides many recipes out of the box while enabling developers to write their own, iteratively feeding the LLM to improve each recipe.
Moderne got its start with Java and other JVM-based languages, but now supports Terraform, JavaScript, and Python, and others, as well as COBOL, JCL, and copybooks on the mainframe – the location of perhaps the most intractable Gordian knots of legacy codebases.
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