InLine Software Corporation
helps you dramatically simplify the assembly of business applications. We make
software development powerful for developers, easy for business experts,
and better for business.

InLineÖ Software Corporation was founded in 1997 to drive the software component revolution into the mainstream of enterprise application delivery for the Internet Age. InLine Standard is the first in an evolving portfolio of products that simplifies the delivery of distributed, enterprise applications by eliminating tedious, manual coding for building Enterprise JavaBeanÖ components and assembling them into fully-functional applications that can be deployed on a variety of different platforms. It enables IT organizations to focus more on business problems and less on programming details while protecting current investments by utilizing and enhancing existing development tools and infrastructure.

The InLineÖ Standard product is the first in a series of major steps toward greatly simplifying the development of business applications. Recent release of the Enterprise JavaBeansÖ (EJB) specification and support for it by major enterprise vendors has now opened the door for developers to build applications in terms of the business problem instead of the programming details. InLine Standard extends your existing JavaÖ IDE to automate the assembly and deployment of EJB components with an innovative set of powerful, yet easy-to-use new features. Those who are new to EJB will find InLine Standard extremely helpful in mastering this new component-based technology. If you're ready to take full advantage of EJB technology, InLine Standard's automation of tedious, error-prone tasks lets you stay focused on building better code.

InLine Standard supports a wide array of tools and platforms without sacrificing their unique features and capabilities. Using a package of Java classes and XML templates called a Personality Module (PM), InLine Standard is easily customized to support the features of specific application servers. When multiple Personality Modules are installed, it can produce EJB-JARs containing EJB components pre-configured for multiple servers.

EJB Component Editor

Inline Standard's wizards and editors make it easy to specify key aspects of EJB components while automatically maintaining the complex relationships between source files. For example, the EJB Component Editor is used to specify abstract features rather than individual methods, to specify access control, attributes, operations, "find" and "create" methods. These features are described through a simple GUI, automatically generating or updating code for the appropriate EJB source files.
When an EJB component is created, you control initial code generation with a template you have created or selected from the application server PM or acquired from third parties, so developers and application server vendors can provide consistent programming models across all components. Templates for all the standard EJB types are included with InLine Standard.
Validation support checks for common errors that make an EJB component invalid and prevent it from executing, saving important time by checking for these errors before deployment. An "auto-correct" feature fixes common errors such as a missing "create" method. Round-trip engineering of EJB component features automatically synchronizes changes you make in either the EJB Component Editor or directly to the code.

Persistence Editor

EJB Container-Managed Persistence (CMP) Modeling Support and Integration
Almost every business application manages persistent data. InLine Standard's wizards and GUI tools simplify the entire process of developing Entity Beans with Container-Managed Persistence and let you use all the target application server features. You can reverse-engineer a database schema to generate either a database model or a set of Entity Beans and forward-engineer a set of Entity Beans to generate either a database model or SQL DDL. Deployment integration is accomplished through the application server PM, which automatically binds EJB component attributes to database elements. The Persistence Editor will perform a validation of your persistence model's columns and indices against Java types, generic SQL92 types, and driver-specific types, making it easy to get deployment for CMP right.
Visual editing tools let you:

- Capture and edit the persistence model, including database tables, table columns and indices. This function can optionally be replaced by the application server PM.
- Read EJB definitions (from the current project or from an EJB JAR file) and produce SQL script to automate creation of database schema needed to support CMP. This function can optionally be replaced by the application server PM.
- Reverse-engineer with a wizard that reads an existing database schema and generates Entity Beans that encapsulate the data in that database.
- Validate database models and automatically correct common errors.

Assembly Editor

Once EJB components are created they can be assembled to create business logic frameworks for applications. InLine Standard lets you recombine EJB components in a number of useful ways. You can combine EJB components in your project with EJB components from existing EJB JARs and create a new assembly plan. Each plan represents a deployment configuration. The same EJB components can be assembled in different ways using different plans to satisfy different application requirements.
For ultimate deployment flexibility, InLine's Assembly Editor lets you re-link an existing assembly of EJB components with a different implementation at deployment time, replacing a portion of the application by substituting one EJB component for another. A stock-trading program, for example, can be entirely written assuming a consistent set of services from any brokerage house. Then, an EJB component specific to one brokerage house can be supplied at deployment time to create the final application. No programming changes are required and the application functions correctly regardless of which company's EJB component is selected. InLine Standard also gives you a way to save these multiple assembly plans for later use.

Deployment Editor

InLine Standard's deployment tools simplify deployment tasks and exploit all the features provided by the target application server. It automates these common deployment tasks:

- Deploy EJB components from the current project.
- Deploy EJB components from an EJB JAR.
- Deploy generic EJB components to any of the supported application servers.
- Load and save multiple deployment configurations

EJB Inspector

The EJB Inspector complements debugging tools to dynamically test deployed EJB components from the InLine Standard GUI. This GUI lets you:

- Start/stop the targeted application server, using the application server PM.
- Create, connect and communicate with EJBs on the application server through a command-line Java interpreter (based on JPython) or a GUI with which you dynamically create new Java/EJB objects, send messages to Java/EJB objects, and inspect and cache return values.

Integration with IDEs; Supported IDEs

InLine Standard is implemented as a plug-in to popular IDEs that extends their functionality by adding EJB and multi-tier deployment capabilities. The following enterprise-standard Java IDEs are supported:

- Symantec Visual Café Professional 3.0c, Database 3.0c, Enterprise 3.1, Expert 4.0
- Inprise Jbuilder3 Pro, Enterprise
- Sun Microsystems Forte for Java Community Edition 1.0 Beta, Build 434, with JDK 1.2 (Beta level support only)

Integration with UML Tools; Supported UML Tools

Developers have the option of adding UML bridging support. Currently, InLine Standard works with these UML tools:

- Rational Rose 98i
- Rational Rose 2000

Support for Application Servers

Application servers often represent major investments for the enterprise. InLine Standard can help organizations make the most of those investments, developing and deploying applications that target and exploit the special features of their application servers. Currently, InLine Standard supports the following application servers:

- BEA WebLogic Server 4.0.3 and 4.5.1
- Oracle 8i
- IBM Websphere 3.0