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The Power of Choice: Developing Client-Server Applications

When we talk about uniPaaS at Magic Software, you will often hear us refer to the “Power of Choice.” It is important to emphasize that the Power of Choice includes as the first choice: the client-server mode of application deployment, sometimes referred to as the full client or open client. Magic Software is fully aware of the strong attachment of many developers to the client server paradigm and is proud of our leadership among client server application platforms. The client server paradigm may evolve and improve, but it will not disappear. The fact that the same application platform provides an option for Web and RIA application programming and deployment is a part of the power of choice, but the first choice of client-server afficionadoes is clear.

One of the key areas of choice in designing client server applications is all of the GUI controls available in uniPaaS. uniPaaS GUI Controls used in client-server programming include: ActiveX, Check Box, Column, Combo Box, Edit, Horizontal Slider, Image, Line, List Box, OLE, Push Button, Radio, Rich Edit, RTF, Static, Subform, Tab, Table, Tree and Vertical Slider. With client-server application development of interactive tasks, subforms give you great control over your application interface.

You can use a subform control to integrate a task form inside the form of another task, while maintaining the subform's task data handling and record cycle activities independently from the parent task.

One can see a number of advantages when using subforms for client server development. Obviously, with subforms you can park on the line of a parent task and see the details from the subtask. This gives you what can be described as a one-to-many task relation. In addition, uniPaaS automatically refreshes the subform data view according to the parent task only when passing parameters. uniPaaS also retains your last position in the subform data view when you leave and reenter. Finally, a tab cycle is provided for the subform task. Taken altogether you have a much more detailed level of interaction that is possible. And yes, of course, all this GUI control is right inside the client-server mode.

The runtime behavior of a subform is quite predictable. At runtime, you can tab into the subform or click the subform window area. The runtime engine will park on the first control in the subtask. When clicking on a parkable location, the runtime engine moves focus to the subtask and parks in the selected control, which triggers the runtime engine to execute the Task Prefix, Record Prefix, and Control Prefix operations. When clicking on a non-parkable location, the runtime engine moves focus to the subform task and parks on the first parkable control there.
When the runtime engine instructs the Subform task to terminate either by a Close event, by clicking outside the Subform area, or by an End Task Condition, the runtime engine executes the Control Suffix, Record Suffix, and Task Suffix operations. The focus returns to the next control in the parent task as determined by the parent task’s tabbing order and tabbing direction. (These behaviours are different, of course, in RIA mode).
When you return to the subtask and the data view has not been refreshed, this means that the Range, Locate, Sort, Key, and the Link Join or Link Outer Join settings have not been modified. The subtask keeps the same page or record that was last displayed. No handling is required for a subtask when the parent task is closed because the subtask automatically closes when the parent task closes.

To learn more about developing client-server applications in uniPaaS, download the free online course “Getting Started with uniPaaS Open Client”from Magic University.

Magic Software DevNet Revealed

You will probably want to add this URL to your favorites: devnet.magicsoftware.com

Magic Software has launched a new developers network for developers using uniPaaS and iBOLT. I found that the navigation of the site is fairly straightforward and doesn’t require much explanation. One simple menu across the top with clear choices causes that section to appear with a bucket of resources below. The left side navigation for each section breaks the information into categories such as “Tree Navigation” in the uniPaaS section.

One of the most welcome resources will be the knowledgebase which had long been hidden under lock and key and reachable only by fortuitous Google searches or seemingly random navigation. Now the library is clearly available.

You can also access free uniPaaS downloads so the site can be used by Magic Software to entice beginners to start learning uniPaaS.

For those of you attending the Magic International Users Group May 12-14, 2010 I would suggest that you come armed with suggestions for improvements. (I already have my own list). In this way, we can work towards making this a true developers network.

Vadim, Magic Software & uniPaaS

Vadim Software develops innovative, integrated financial, municipal, asset and utility management software for Municipalities, Local Governments and Utility Companies. Founded in 1975, Vadim has been dedicated to this market for over 34 years.

All municipal and financial products by Vadim use the latest proven technologies by Magic Software Enterprises and are designed to be expandable as their customers grow. In this way, Vadim protects the long term investment of its customers.

Magic Software is a leading provider of application platform, and business and process integration solutions. uniPaaS is Magic Software’s comprehensive application platform and the next generation of the company’s award-winning eDeveloper series, which Vadim Software's powerful iCity application has been built upon.

At the start of the project for the upcoming major release of iCity, Vadim conducted a thorough review of the technology platform to ensure that their customers are able to grow with today’s and tomorrow’s technology advances. “Software solution providers face a daunting challenge in keeping pace with infrastructure technology changes and user demand for new services, while maximizing productivity of their development teams. With uniPaaS, we have an application platform that lets us focus on the features needed by our customers, while protecting our existing investment already in our iCity product offering,” says Wendy Jarvis, Vadim Software’s General Manager.

uniPaaS business benefits

uniPaaS provides many benefits that allow software solution providers to go to market faster when delivering solutions to their customers. These benefits include:

Business-oriented application development

Significantly faster time-to-market for new development efforts

Better performance & responsiveness

Considerably lower cost of operation & ownership

Much lower development risks

Superior application productivity

Investment and skills preservation

During Vadim’s upgrade project, many benefits of moving to uniPaaS were recognized immediately. “The migration process itself was seamless and did not jeopardize the existing business logic already built into the iCity software,” states Andrew Corcoran, Director of Development & Support. “Often, when taking on projects of this magnitude, there is an inherent risk that existing code has to be reworked or tweaked to perform correctly in a new environment. This usually requires an extensive amount of time being invested in reworking functionality that already exists, when the preference would be to invest that time in enhancing the product further. This, however, was not the case with our migration to uniPaaS; the platform allowed us to focus our efforts in bringing further improvements to our software, instead of worrying about protecting existing business logic.”

The uniPaaS pedigree - backed by experience that counts

uniPaaS leverages Magic Software’s 20 year pedigree in delivering business application development and deployment software to market.

Magic Software’s core technology has been successfully deployed in thousands of applications in more than 60 countries worldwide. As a result, uniPaaS has been highly-tested in real world mission-critical settings. uniPaaS is also backed by an experienced global support and professional services team and a network of more than 2,500 independent software vendors and business partners capable of delivering a full range of services to enterprise customers.

Vadim and Magic working closely together

The strong, ongoing relationship between Vadim Software and Magic Software Enterprises, as well as the advances in technology that uniPaaS brings, ensures the successful advancement of the iCity solution. Magic Software continues to offer appropriate technologies that Vadim will be able to leverage to deliver appropriate software solutions to financial, municipal, asset and utility management customers.

For additional information, please contact Vadim Software at (250) 763-7654 or send an email inquiry to sales@vadimsoftware.com

Save A Bundle With Real-Time Shop Floor Automation Software

The uniPaaS application platform is ideally suited to needs related to shop floor manufacturing. I had the opportunity to witness apparel manufacturing software with my own eyes on the floor of an apparel manufacturing facility in the vicinity of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I saw the eFactory real-time manufacturing system by Informaplus automate bundle tracking processes that are integral to the way apparel manufacturers route work-in-process.

eFactory™ is a real-time apparel manufacturing data collection system that collects and reacts to shop floor information during production. The system constantly keeps track of who is doing what, where, when and for how long. And... how long it should be taking. This data is captured using factory terminals, located near each operator on the factory floor. Even while the data is being captured and reacted to, the system produces up-to-the-minute, meaningful reports about production that you can react to, to increase your revenue and productivity. The system covers all shop floor activities from work in process issuance to finished goods registration including gross payroll, employee efficiency and work in process.

The eFactory system is based on more than two decades of domain expertise and research and development in the Garment Industry. eFactory’s comprehensive capabilities exceed requirements, and yet Informaplus also has the ability to customize the system to meet specific interface or functional requirements in particular manufacturing processes.

The eFactory system offers several modules, including a Master Tables Module, Cutting Module, Bar-coded Cards Module , Real-time Module, Change of Standards Module , Gross Payroll Module , Inquiries & Reports Module , Productivity Module, Work in process tracking Module, and Shop Floor Module. Each of these modules controls specific functions that enable customers to boost productivity in the areas that are most important to their manufacturing process.

It was easy-to-see the benefits of what was happening on two levels: from the end user perspective and from the vantage point of the software developer. For the end user, bundle ticket printing is automated, employee time tracking is automated, and costs are reduced by having real-time visibility of inventory and work-in-process. At the same time employees are happy because of the accuracy and immediacy of productivity related feedback and management is thrilled to be able to see the bottlenecks and problems in the manufacturing process.

Software developers prefer uniPaaS as an application platform and development tool for shop floor manufacturing applications because of its strength in data-centric business application development, easy ability to connect multiple data entry and tracking stations and robust reliability. In fact, the eFactory system has been implemented with as many as 1500 real-time data input points and no latency problems.

Developers have told me that prior to uniPaaS, the development and implementation of new business applications became increasingly complex and required increasingly varied skills and extended testing, driving costs up. At the same time, reduced software budgets constrained innovation. With uniPaaS, capabilities are provided for application integration and composite application capabilities. uniPaaS reduces development challenges by encoding business functionality as metadata. Existing developers can quickly become familiar with such platforms thanks to the abstraction of technology inherent to uniPaaS.

So if you’re looking to save a bundle on apparel manufacturing software, consider InformaPlus – and if you’re just looking for a better way to build shop floor applications, consider uniPaaS. For more information on the entire suite of applications and solutions available from InformaPlus, please contact Sylvain Raymond at (514) 956-5566. Or email eFactory@informaplus.com or visit Informaplus.com.

K&K Management Solutions On The Go With the uniPaaS Application Platform

Using the uniPaaS application platform for mobile applications that connect delivery vehicles to the home office makes sense – and dollars too. K&K Management Solutions use Magic Software’s uniPaaS to make a suite of software for the refined fuels and propane industry. K&K has been creating leading-edge energy business and law enforcement software since 1986. Energy-Force and Energy-Track are twin applications for home office and mobile units that optimize the business of energy delivery. And Energy-Image automates the management of documents to streamline paperwork and ensure compliance.

Energy-Track puts mobile truck automation “at your fingertips — anytime, anywhere.” When K&K makes software modifications in Energy-Force, they immediately deploy the same changes in Energy-Track so they're always in sync with each other. Energy-Track puts the solution to energy delivery inefficiencies in the palm of a drivers hand. Literally. Running on a handheld Panasonic ToughBook with standard Windows, Energy-Track allows the capabilities of Energy-Force to be delivered on the go.

More than a ticket printer in a truck, Energy-Track empowers drivers so that office calls are reduced. It puts critical info at drivers' fingertips, including contract/pre-buy info, pricing, call-ins/minimum drops and delivery "holds" on a tank, and more.

It also balances daily trip/manifest reports for every driver and prints a professional invoice for customers. Best of all, when the mobile unit syncs with Energy-Force, Energy-Force attaches a copy of the original ticket to its history line item and the original trip/manifest report to the sales journal. Customers never have to look for lost tickets or receipts.

For more information on the entire suite of applicationscontact K&K Management Solutions at 800-783-6560. Or email Sales@KKComp.com or visit KKComp.com.

High Level Enterprise RIA Requirements and Specifications

When you sit down to issue an RFP for an enterprise Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform or framework, what are the high-level considerations that most other enterprises consider important? How do your goals for deploying a RIA platform affect the high-level priorities that you set? We’ve talked with hundreds of our customers and prospects around the world about their RIA deployments and RIA planning.

From the outset, it became clear that ISVs and companies that operate large public websites have different requirements than enterprises when it comes to RIA. Enterprises place a much higher priority on ease-of-development and reduced complexity while large ISVs and Website Companies seemed to thrive on approaches with a diversity of tools. Enterprises were also much more concerned about information than they were appearances. The UI was important, but certainly not as important as issues such as transactional integrity, operational reliability and security. Scalability requirements, on the other hand, reached their peak with the large website operators and ISVs, even more than the large enterprises. Midsize enterprises had relatively modest scalability needs.

What follows reflects some of the common-threads or consensus around best practice for RIA platform selection, specifications and requirements enterprise IT needs. One of the initial trends that we noted is that the desire for RIA was usually driven by either the need to enhance the enterprise capabilities of delivering compelling user experiences for users of their public-facing websites or it was driven by the need for enhanced user experiences in the use of internal enterprise applications. In this latter group, the need was often expressed as a desire to evolve from existing application platforms to newer platforms with RIA capabilities.

Enterprise RIA Platform Requirements.
Many large and mid-size enterprises write their own software applications to support proprietary or unique business processes. Today’s client-server applications are typically characterized by uninteresting gray screens and text with a high-degree of transactional functionality around structured data as opposed to more visually appealing layouts and rich media types involving unstructured data. As “the Facebook Generation” enters the workforce, expectations for immersive and dynamic user experiences are increasing within the enterprise. But the transactional sophistication of data-centric business applications must not be sacrificed.

Ease-of-development. Typically, customers desiring a new application platform were concerned about the effort required to build or migrate applications. The need for developer productivity topped their list of requirements and typically became the starting point for discussions. “How difficult is it to develop applications?” was a common question. Although not always expressed as a requirement, a metadata centric application platform will go a long way toward optimizing ease-of-use for developers.

Compatibility with Existing Platforms. At the same time, there was a desire for continuity. Enterprises considering new RIA platforms want the solutions they begin to deploy to be compatible with existing platforms. Interestingly, this did not usually mean that they wanted to continue using the same legacy tools and languages such as RPG, COBOL, Java or C++. But rather, it meant that they wanted to be able to access the data and business logic layers of those applications while simultaneously deploying on a RIA platform. This desire for composite applications is matched by a desire to gradually replace legacy code with new business logic utilizing more service oriented approaches.

Leveraging Existing Skillsets. Enterprises tend to employ a more mature workforce than ISVs and websites. As a result, they seem to have an even higher concern about skills compatibility. We often heard about developers nearing retirement and their reluctance to learn new programming languages. This sometimes led to a requirement that the new RIA platforms offer paradigms and approaches with a low learning curve and compatibility with existing skills.

Vendor Support. Once these concerns were met, enterprise buyers then became interested in the vendors standing behind the RIA platforms and tools. Vendor longevity, community footprint, support services offered and vendor reputation for reliability were all especially important to enterprise IT buyers seeking to replace current application platforms with a RIA application platform.

Enterprise Website RIA Requirements. Interestingly, even within similar types of companies, the RIA requirements expressed varied notably for those whose primary need was not for internal facing applications but rather for their public facing websites. Where the concerns expressed around enterprise IT platforms primarily had to do with the impact on the companies IT culture (ease-of-use, platform compatibility, skillset compatibility, vendor support).

Browser Independence. Although it may seem counterintuitive, one of the primary needs expressed by those seeking RIA capabilities for their websites is browser-independence. The goal is to offer application capabilities in RIA clients that are independent of the browser and all of its security, performance and other limitations.

Cross-platform, cross-database support. For enterprise websites, customers also often expressed a need for compatibility with existing servers, but this need was often expressed as server neutrality. When drilling down on these requirements, however, it seemed most enterprises were looking for server side technology that was cross-platform and cross-database capable in case the underlying infrastructure changed.

Web friendly client footprint. Enterprise IT departments seemed frequently expressed the need for efficient RIA client footprints. With a RIA client footprint that is too large, the company’s website vistors may become impatient or even abandon the site. With a client footprint that is too light, however, capabilities will be constrained. The debate between the benefits of a fat client versus a thin client are not new. In the context of RIA, it has led Magic Software Enterprises to describe its RIA client as “neither fat nor thin, but fit: the right fit for both power and efficiency.”

Ease of updating. The ease-of-updating the RIA client was another frequently identified requirement of those enterprise buyers seeking enhanced capabilities for public facing websites. With sites servicing the public, onerous update processes are problematic.