Our products were initially developed for and used by our services organization to enable them to meet the application development and business process challenges of our customers. I believe the fact that our products were developed as solutions for real customer challenges before they were commercialized has been a critical factor to our success. As a result, these products are fully integrated to deliver rapid and high quality results to our service organization and our customers.
Application Development Wizards and Message Handling
We started with application development patterns and QAT Wizard because it was clear that we needed development standards and productivity tools to help speed our development cycle and maintain high quality and consistency across all our development efforts.
- AllFusion® Gen Plug-in (Wizard)
- Fully Customizable Pattern Model
- Multiple User Defined Functions
- Interview Management Tool
- Message Handling Component
QAT Wizard is an application development accelerator that will rapidly copy any pattern model and customize it according to a user defined interview. A starter pattern model includes Multiple patterns for Web, Client/Server and CBD architectures. The pattern model also includes multiple user defined functions to assist with things such as specialized formatting and global data management. The QAT Interview Manager makes it easy to develop custom interviews that direct the wizard to include/exclude and customize the desired options within the pattern. The QAT Wizard Plug-in executes the copy and customization according to the interview and produces a clean copy of the new application with all the desired options working against the selected entities and attributes. This product is also bundled with a robust application message handling component that can be used to manage return/reason code processing.
Application Security
Security is a key element of any enterprise application and distributed applications have even more robust needs so QAT Security was developed next. This component has recently been further enhanced with several powerful new features. Although this component is built with AllFusion® Gen, it fits nicely into any development environment by leveraging the validation and authentication web services.
- AllFusion® Gen Component
- Web Service Enabled
- Enterprise User Authentication
- Enterprise Security Validation
- Rule Based Validation
A security business component that is used to implement enterprise application security. User authentication and security authorization services can be implemented easily into any application or SOA framework. Developers can use this system to quickly secure any Window, Service, Function, Field and/or Control in combination with any value of data in an application. Complex rules can be applied against static or dynamic data values to simplify the validation requirements required within the application.
Business Process Management
As the applications we were building for our customers became more complex, we started to realize that certain business processes and related data structures should be controlled by the business units rather than being hard coded into the application in the traditional manner. Our customers were asking for applications that gave them more control of the business process so they would not have to go back to IT every time something in the process changed. However, they still wanted IT to provide the database and integration services.
This prompted us to build QAT Flow - a graphical business process automation tool that could truly be used by a business analyst or customer to automate complex and/or cross functional business processes and automatically integrate services that are provisioned and registered by the IT organization. QAT Flow is our largest and most powerful component. It takes time to understand how to fully leverage this component. However, we have several overwhelming successes with this product and our customers find it well worth their time.
- Graphical Process Modeling
- Robust Rule Processing Capabilities
- Interpretive Execution
- Strong Version Control
- Seamless integration with Gen
- Web Service Integration
- Automated Data Collection Screens
- Automated Application Control
- Dynamic Data Integration
- Windows and Web UI Support
A graphical business process automation engine that can automate complex business processes within the enterprise, including automatic data collection and robust queue management with or without IT developed interfaces. Activities are modeled using the embedded graphical process designer and interpretively executed by the QAT Flow process engine. Gen action blocks can be seamlessly integrated without wrapping of any kind because the QAT Flow engine is a Gen service. QAT Flow can be called as a web service and can also call other web services. QAT Flow also implements a meta data solution (dynamic data) that allows for support tables and permitted values to be defined, captured and presented without implementing any new physical database tables or user interfaces.
AllFusion® Gen User Defined Functions
When it comes to AllFusion® Gen development, external action blocks (EAB’s) have always been necessary in order to extend the functionality of the tool and enable functionality that Gen doesn’t do natively. Although this approach works, it has always come at a cost because EAB’s present specific management issues. The code isn’t part of the model so it must always be stored and managed outside of Gen. In addition, the customers must then manage separate skill sets for these environments and debugging this external code adds one more layer of complexity. Then we must consider that moving to new platforms requires these EAB’s to be re-written for the new platform.
All this complexity with external code was becoming more of a burden on or clients and they started looking to us for alternatives. Our solution was QAT Function Manager, which is a product that allows anyone to add user defined functions to their Gen models so this external functionality could be implemented as a runtime library instead of EAB’s.
Of course, we were also looking forward to providing other new functionality to our AllFusion® Gen customers, such as the ability to manage XML for integration and even report generation so user defined functions would provide a much more convenient way delivering this new functionality.
- User Defined Function for Gen
- Import / Export Function Libraries
- Function Stub Generation for C, Java, .NET and COBOL
All AllFusion® Gen Plug-in that adds new functionality to your AllFusion® Gen applications by extending the list of available functions in your models. Any external code can be turned into a Custom Function. QAT Function Manager will even generate the stub source for your platform (C, Java, .NET and COBOL).
AllFusion® Gen XML Handling
AllFusion® Gen doesn’t support XML handling natively, but XML was quickly becoming the new standard for system and B2B integration. Customers were requiring XML in their new applications on a regular basis.
We decided to develop QAT Exchange, which provides a graphical user interface and a new Function Library (using QAT Function Manager) to enable Gen to handle XML in a native fashion. However, it wasn’t enough just to provide the xml handling function library. We also decided to generate the AllFusion® Gen action diagrams to handle the XML for the customer. QAT Exchange allows the customer to define the send and/or receive XML handlers by defining customer XML Schema’s and selecting entities and work sets from their model. We also wanted to generate the formatting code so the customer wouldn’t have to define all of the edits to build and parse the XML values.
With QAT Exchange, once the schema and action block requirements are defined within the visual interface of the QAT Exchange Plug-in, we generate the necessary action diagrams to handle the XML, complete with all the code necessary to send or receive the formatted XML. These action blocks are then generated and installed just like any other Gen action diagram.
- AllFusion® Gen Plug-in
- Visual Design of XML Handlers
- Automatic AllFusion® Gen Action Diagram Generation
- No External Action Block Usage
- Consistency Checking against Gen Model
- Full XML DOM and XPATH Support
Provides a solution that enables bi-directional XML communication between AllFusion® Gen applications and external applications using custom defined layouts. QAT Exchange generates custom Action Diagram Code, complete with all necessary formatting instructions and edit patterns meaning you are free from the cost and inconvenience of external action blocks.
AllFusion® Gen Open Standard Reporting
AllFusion® Gen doesn’t support report generation natively. There are a few solutions on the market, but they utilize proprietary report design tools, external action blocks and some even require deployed local databases. Customers generally do not like external action blocks and they were now asking for web based reports using PDF, HTML, Word and other formats. We didn’t want to get into the report designer business because there were already several very good designers on the market, including Crystal Reports and several Style Sheet Designers. We also wanted to avoid the need for external action blocks. We already had the functions necessary to enable Gen to handle XML so we decided to develop QAT Publisher - a new reporting tool for AllFusion® Gen that uses open standard XML and Style Sheet technology. This would also allow us to leverage any of the great style sheet design tools on the market rather than asking our customer to depend on us to keep up with the rapid evolution of these open standards.
- AllFusion® Gen Plug-in
- Visual Design of XML Report Structure
- Automatic AllFusion® Gen Action Diagram Generation
- Multiple Supplied Custom Functions
- No External Action Block Usage
- Consistency Checking against Gen Model
Provides a solution that enables publication and reporting of information contained in AllFusion® Gen applications to several different formats, including HTML, PDF, RTF, RPT (Crystal Reports) and Excel. QAT Publisher benefits from existing XML technologies and integrates seamlessly with the AllFusion® Gen model-based approach without the cost and inconvenience of external action blocks.
Thin Web Clients and Rich Web User Interfaces
With the arrival of the web 2.0 technologies, most customer are now demanding web applications and they expect the same rich user interfaces and response times as we have been providing in the Windows environment for so long. They are also looking towards service oriented architectures (SOA) in order to integrate all of the desperate technologies within their enterprise. Some of these customers are using AllFusion® Gen and some are not, but others are using a mix of Gen and other technologies.
We recognized the need for a framework that could help us standardize our SOA capabilities as well as integrate the various technologies, including AllFusion® Gen web applications into a seamless user interface. This presented several challenges that had to be solved by this new framework. First, we need to build high performance applications using the new Web 2.0 technologies, such as AJAX, in order to prevent the traditional page flickering and associated performance issues. Also, in order to integrate web applications based on various technologies, we needed a way to effectively share data across these applications within the web environment and this had to include the new and existing Gen applications we’re building with our customers.
Our solution to these issues is QAT WebDaptive, which is an AJAX framework that provides some powerful and unique services that solve these issues. For example, the session service is an enterprise web service that provides simple access to global application data for any web service enabled technology, including AllFusion® Gen. In fact we provide new custom functions for AllFusion® Gen to call this and other WebDaptive services directly from the action diagrams. We also wanted to enable customers to develop hand coded user interfaces that seamlessly consume web services (including AllFusion® Gen servers) and integrate those hand coded applications with the Gen applications in a single interface and all using a single browser session within the application server. QAT WebDaptive also provides a communications client that allows hand coded applications to communicate via HTML, XML or SOAP without parsing any XML. This is done using AJAX style calls so we only get and send the data required vs. resending the entire page.
QAT WebDaptive allows us to leverage the strengths of the various technologies and integrate them within a single page web interface. For example, a customer may like to use AllFusion® Gen for a particular application, but if that application requires a few hand coded pages for whatever reason, they may determine that the entire application must be done outside of Gen. However, the reality is that Gen would be a perfect fit for the remaining parts of the application and would save significant time an effort is used. QAT WebDaptive provides the flexibility to use the web technology that best fits each application part and still integrate those technologies as a single integrated application.
- Responsive Rich Web User Interfaces
- Seamless Technology Integration
- Open Standard Technology
- AJAX Communications
- Global Session Service
- Security Service
- Logging Service
- Powerful JavaScript Function Library
- AllFusion® Gen Integration
- Multiple Customizable Style Templates
QAT WebDaptive combines the power of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with Rich Web Clients (AJAX) to provide an ultimate application experience on the web. The Web Client Framework is combined with the embedded AJAX Communications and the Enterprise Session Services to provide an easy way for developers to deliver rich user interfaces on the web, as well as, the cross application integration required in today's IT environment.
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