Technology Integration
The ultimate goal of the San Francisco frameworks is to enable rapid application development by providing a base set of constructs for reuse by developers in building application solutions. The developers will be coming from several different application disciplines.
San Francisco will allow them to integrate several different types of approaches into their applications. For example: compound documents, business process modeling and control (workflow), and internet/intranet and Java. It is our plan to provide sample demonstrations of how these technologies can be integrated to enable rich application solutiondevelopment.
- Compound Documents
Application development in the compound document environments include Lotus Notes and scripting, Java Beans , and OLE (ActiveX)5 desktop centric document style of applications. It focuses on how a document is presented to the end user and how the information/data is represented. Attached to the various sections or parts of the form are scripts containing the functional extensions.
An example is a form representing a sales order. As the form passes through its life cycle, parts are executed and data values populate the form, such as name and address are retrieved for the heading information, inventory items are parts of the body, totals and discounts are calculated for the totals area.
San Francisco frameworks can be used as a basis for these parts, providing the functional extensions for these compound documents.
- Business Process Modeling and Control
Business Process Reengineering is giving focus to a number of technologies, including modeling tools and workflow process control engines. Workflow technology enables a layer of control, outside of the normal application solutions. This allows for flexibility to modify business process to market demands, and at the same time keeping controls and audits for existing processes. Customers are focusing on their business processes, trying to streamline and control them for increased efficiency and cost savings.
Application developers in this environment need to have the ability to use San Francisco frameworks as business activities within a process, and also the ability for the frameworks to initiate business processes. They will use workflow products to "glue" various new and existing applications together into a coherent business process, passing parameters between application activities via workflow products.
- Internet/Intranet and Java
This is currently one of the fastest growing and exciting technologies, enabling distributed application solutions. Applications may be designed and configured to either include execution of objects on the client or to have all execution on the server. Solutions will need to allow seamless integration between Java and non-Java environments.