White Paper: A Management Perspective

Proven Approaches to Plan, Build, and Manage
Enterprise-wide Business-critical Solutions

Introduction

In today's business world, change is a constant: product life cycles grow shorter, customers demand greater service, new opportunities and challenges appear every day. To cope effectively, your organization requires reliable enterprise-wide applications which are flexible and responsive to your changing business needs.

USoft has a proven and reliable solution: Server/Client computing. Since 1988, USoft's enabling technology has helped more than 350 major companies worldwide, each supporting up to thousands of users, solve their most difficult business problems with enterprise-wide, business-critical applications.

Organizations entrust their applications development to USoft because the USoft Server/Client approach brings predictability, scalability, and adaptability to the applications development and the production environment.

Why are predictability, scalability and adaptability important to you?

USoft's Server/Client approach delivers enterprise-wide, business-critical solutions that are beyond the capability of the traditional client/server approach. The Server/Client approach is based on a central, active, and dynamic repository that contains the information models, business rules, business process information and graphical user interface (GUI -- e.g. Microsoft Windows) definitions required to automatically produce both server and client applications.

Paying close attention to the server is critical for achieving robust, scalable industrial strength client/ server implementations.

Judith Hurwitz,
President and CEO,
Hurwitz Consulting Group

By contrast, client/server concentrates on the client side of applications development, particularly the GUI, and ignores the business rules and data processing logic resident on the server side. As a result, client/server is only a partial solution for today's business.

USoft offers a complete solution. Server/Client begins on the server-side, automatically producing intuitive, easy-to-use GUIs from the business-oriented foundation. Your applications will have the guaranteed robustness and functional richness of server-based solutions combined with the ease-of-use of graphical clients. While USoft products represent a unified set of application development, deployment and maintenance tools, they can also be integrated with the CASE tools your organization is already using.

USoft's object architecture enables developers to more easily design, define and maintain applications. Objects and rules are defined once in the central repository and are then available for reuse in other parts of the application. Because USoft's repository is dynamic, a change in an object or any of its attributes automatically propagates throughout the application, saving development time and ensuring consistency across your application.

USoft Server/Client applications are deployed transparently to all popular server and client platforms, including support for leading relational database management systems (RDBMS) and GUIs. This transparency means you can develop independently of the target platform and that the best price/performance options are always available to you.

Server/Client picks up where client/server leaves off by providing unprecedented iterative rapid application development and flexibility at all levels of the enterprise. USoft's proven Server/Client approach delivers predictable, scalable and adaptable solutions to business problems.

The following describes how USoft will help you develop better applications that fit the way your business works.

Predictability

Predictable Solutions Reduce Risk

USoft can work in partnership with you on a Pilot Project tailored to meet your business needs and designed to give you a successful head start in completing your first USoft application.

USoft's Pilot Project is a working application which uses your company's data model and business rules. It can be completed in a short time-frame and forms the foundation for the rest of your system. USoft professionals can provide the product training, support services, and consulting necessary to help you build the first iteration of your business application. After the project is complete, you and your organization will have a clear understanding of the USoft development approach.

Applications development with USoft integrates with your current environment, protecting your existing capital and intellectual investment.

USoft supports all popular server and client platforms, leading RDBMS, GUIs and Transaction Processing (TP) monitors -- minimizing the need to purchase new hardware or software. Instead of imposing a new language (e.g., C++) on your environment, USoft enables you to immediately begin developing USoft applications by leveraging your existing skills in business modeling and relational databases.

By getting the business rules right, we get the system right. Our users now have far more respect for the MIS department, because we are talking in terms they understand.

Eammon Townsend,
Development manager,
NEC Europe

Using USoft Server/Client software toolset, you can have confidence that as your business changes, you minimize the turnaround time for applications that reflect this change.

As the business environment changes, USoft's object architecture is ready to support your application's evolution. Active inheritance and single definition of rules, objects, and attributes in the central repository eliminates the need to track each individual instance of the object being changed. Updates to business rules, objects, or windows only need to be defined once and then these changes are automatically propagated throughout the application.

In addition, USoft gives you the powerful ability to create a corporate GUI style guide. This guide enforces customizable GUI standards across your application to ensure a consistent look and feel for users. Changes to the style guide are defined once and are immediately reflected in all related application windows. As a result, you minimize the complexity (common in traditional environments) of maintaining GUIs for enterprise-wide applications.

Because USoft provides transparency, you can also feel confident that, as your hardware, software, GUI, database or TP monitor changes, your applications will accommodate this change. USoft applications can support you now and in the future.

Concentrate on determining your business needs knowing that the USoft developed applications will support them.

You no longer have to force your business to fit a particular technology or application. You can make your application fit your business. USoft's server-centric approach gives you the robustness necessary to handle complex business rules and data processing logic. Screen-painter development tools cannot handle this level of sophistication because they do not deal effectively with the server side of applications development. This is where the server-centric approach excels.

When users understand an application, they are quicker to buy in and have a sense of ownership.

Joe Lilly,
Project Manager,
Department of General Services,
Commonwealth of Virginia

USoft's development tools and methodology ensure user satisfaction with the resulting applications.

Traditionally the final developed application rarely satisfies its users. These applications often have one or more of the following shortcomings from the user's perspective:

USoft ensures that the resulting applications exactly meet user requirements for functionality, ease-of-use and intuitive interfaces:

Iterative Rapid Application Development

From the initial design phase forward, this development methodology intimately involves users in the evolution of the application. Users meet regularly with developers to review completed sections of their application and provide feedback at each iteration of the application.

Simulate and Evaluate Production Applications

USoft allows users and developers to "walk through" an application on a screen-by-screen basis. This walk-through enables them to evaluate and comment on the application at each stage of development. Users and developers can now step through their screens when they review applications under development instead of through a thick functional specification binder.

Automatically Produces Intuitive GUIs

The screen layouts are based on default GUI style guides, which the developer can customize. These style guides and their definitions reside in the central repository. USoft Developer then dynamically produces the client windows. USoft's object architecture ensures synchronization of windows and window objects. If the object changes, this change is propagated to all related windows. Any customized screens are automatically maintained by the system across iterations, avoiding the need to re-enter modifications already made to the user interface.

USoft Benchmark reduces the risk of development by helping to evaluate the final application's performance before that application becomes "business-critical"

With USoft, developers have the ability to predict resource usage of applications in production. USoft Benchmark also provides developers with the tools required to evaluate the performance and load capacity of a new application while that application is still in the development cycle. Unlike other products which only test the performance of the whole application as a unit, USoft Benchmark allows you to identify and evaluate bottlenecks of the application module by module and fix them early in the development cycle prior to deployment.

USoft rules broker ensures that there is no risk of unauthorized access or data corruption when using ODBC-compliant desktop tools to access enterprise data

Unlike other tools supporting Microsoft standard Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), USoft ODBC Server integrates with the "rules broker" in the central repository. The broker provides user authorization and data integrity checks between ODBC-compliant desktop tools (e.g., MS-Excel, MS-Word, MS-Access, MS-Visual Basic, Sybase's Power-builder, etc.) and enterprise data. This extra layer of security ensures that only authorized users have access to certain data and that all ODBC data manipulation routines are checked against the business and data integrity rules defined within the central repository. As a result, there is no risk of compromising the integrity (rules) of the database.

USoft Bridge Server allows your staff to move to a new development environment without giving up familiar tools

If your staff is currently using CASE tools for analysis and design, they can continue to use the same tools to create validated definitions which are then stored as models in the USoft central repository. USoft Bridge Server verifies data model integrity and repository consistency. Therefore, USoft protects your existing capital and intellectual investment in CASE tools.

USoft helps you deliver your application development projects on schedule and within budget

The USoft environment makes developers more efficient and productive. Fewer developers get more accomplished in less time. Because developers need only define objects and rules once, initial development and maintenance time is significantly reduced. Maintenance cost-savings can be significant when you consider that often more than 50% of the total cost of traditional applications development is on the maintenance side.

USoft offers complete consulting, training, and support services to help you develop applications that meet your needs and design

Because the USoft Server/Client software toolset is easy-to-use and powerful, developers can be trained in a short amount of time and immediately begin working at high levels of productivity. Experienced USoft consultants and support staff can also help organizations plan and execute their migration and integration strategies. USoft's network of certified services alliances augment this capability for long-term consulting engagements. With this support, your organization will be able to take full advantage of Server/Client technology and have the confidence and knowledge to develop, enterprise-wide business-critical applications.

Scalability

No longer do you have to consider, "Will this solution work with our current technology?" USoft helps your enterprise technology strategy to be environment-independent, exploiting the power of open systems and allowing you to focus on your business instead.

Server/Client software toolset enables applications to scale with your business

USoft's object architecture enables easier scaling of applications, as data, rules, functions, and business processes increase. When your user community grows, the server-centric technology provides your applications with the necessary power to satisfy them. Likewise, USoft's transparency allows you to easily scale your hardware, middleware, or database as your business needs warrant. Now you can make purchasing decisions based on which GUI, software, RDBMS, or hardware, makes the most sense for your particular business requirements.

ODBC Server brings the power of your desktop applications to the enterprise level

The USoft ODBC Server allows desktop tools, such as MS-Word, MS-Excel, MS-Access, MS-Visual Basic, Sybase's Powerbuilder, and other ODBC compliant applications, to retrieve and update information across enterprise databases. For example, you can bring data from an enterprise relational database into your MS-Excel worksheet for analysis, reporting, and charting. USoft's rules broker guarantees user authorization and data integrity so users do not have to worry about corrupting data. The effect is that your desktop tools are integrated with your enterprise-wide applications. Users become more productive and are able to work the way they want to work.

USoft Batch Server expands the traditional bounds of client/server applications by giving you the ability to run batch jobs

USoft Batch Server extends the ability of your USoft Server/Client development environment to include the definition and execution of batch jobs within the USoft developed application These jobs may either be executed on-line or deferred. All jobs that involve the manipulation of data are checked against the database constraints and business rules as defined in the USoft repository. Any actions that violate a rule are automatically logged. This guarantees the integrity of valuable data. USoft Batch Server alleviates the burden of having to (re)program these checks in database loaders or in data manipulation programs.

USoft helps make enterprise-wide distributed computing a reality

With the flexibility to put functions anywhere in the network (on both servers and clients), your application processing can be partitioned so that functional modules can be located where it makes the most sense to minimize network traffic and maximize performance.

USoft supports business-critical on-line transaction processing (OLTP) with TP monitors

With USoft Developer, you can create enterprise-level OLTP applications from repository-based definitions. USoft's support of transaction processing monitors assures that your company's most business-critical applications are highly available, reliably updated and capable of processing thousands of simultaneous transactions. USoft supports Novell's industry leading Tuxedo transaction processing monitor and supports interoperability with other popular transaction monitors through USoft Open Transport.

USoft supports scalable processing

No matter how much processing power you are currently using or planning to use, USoft applications are independent of hardware. These applications run on single processor platforms and scalable parallel processor platforms. This powerful feature to support parallel processing is integral to each module. So whether you need to support complex queries or thousands of transactions, USoft can meet your business requirements today and in the future.

Adaptability

In production environments, USoft uses "smart partitioning" to execute requests in the most efficient way possible. Your enterprise can now leverage all the computing resources at its disposal to tackle larger, resource-intensive applications.

Using USoft Server/Client software toolset solutions, application development mirrors your business

Solving business problems and fulfilling business needs are what drives USoft's approach. When your business needs change, you want your application to reflect these changes as quickly and as accurately as possible. USoft provides the enabling methodology and technology for Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). USoft's object architecture ensures a close connection between your business definitions and your applications. This architecture along with the active, dynamic Server/Client repository allows effective reuse of application components (through inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism).

With USoft, maintaining applications requires less time, effort, and money

Because USoft stores an application's business logic, GUI, and data structure as objects, which are well encapsulated in a central repository, updating an application's functionality is easy and has little impact on the rest of the system. All maintenance changes are made once then automatically propagated throughout the application. Because USoft is a codeless environment, with database access and manipulation through SQL, developers can avoid the time-consuming and error-bound step of programming in traditional programming languages. No code means easier maintenance.

USoft's model-based approach to development allows developers to see clearly the current version of the application's structure and functionality. As a result, maintenance is easier because adjustments to the application are made through the model itself. Model-based development reduces the workload associated with application maintenance dramatically.

USoft helps developers maintain applications better because they better understand the business

USoft's development environment and methodology allow developers to focus their efforts on understanding users' evolving business needs throughout the enterprise. Developers can use a common approach through USoft's unified application development toolset to meet these enterprise-wide needs. Development staff no longer need to work in isolation on specific technology problems for single user, workstation or department. USoft helps bring developers together with common understanding of both the technology and the business. Thus, developers can better serve users and the organization.

Summary

Server/Client development is based on a server-centric active and dynamic repository. It captures information models, business rules, business process information, and GUI definitions, then automatically generates enterprise-wide business solutions. As a result, both server and clients are synchronized to reflect your rapidly changing business requirements.

In addition, USoft Server/Client software toolset supports batch processing, benchmarking, popular modeling tools, and third-party ODBC tools with guaranteed data integrity and authorization protection. Object architecture eases initial development and maintenance. And Server/Client applications are deployed transparently to all popular server and client platforms -- including support for leading RDBMS, GUIs and TP monitors -- providing unparalleled freedom of choice.

In short, Server/Client delivers the predictability, scalability, and adaptability you need for your IT strategy to serve your business strategy. Predictable solutions reduce the risk and cost inherent in applications development and maintenance. Scalable solutions grow as your business grows. And adaptable solutions help your business anticipate, prepare for, and embrace change.

The USoft Server/Client software toolset will help you develop better applications to fit the way your business works.

For more information on USoft Server/Client solutions, call toll-free at 1-800-For-USoft, or call one of our offices.

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