Net Another Platform

UNIFACE WebEnabler to Speed Creation of Business Applications for World Wide Web

At Carnegie Mellon University, students with PCs in their dorm rooms can surf the World Wide Web for information on everything from foreign economies to new cars. This fall, they will pick and choose their spring semester classes online, too. They will be able to register from anywhere, at any time of day or night.

Carnegie Mellon is just one of many organizations eager to take advantage of the Internet for everyday information processing. ‘Most people have a Web browser and access to the Internet,’ says Bob Rittiger, senior software engineer at the university, which is located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ‘As soon as students and faculty see how nice the Web is to use as an interface, they’re going to start demanding more and more of these applications.’

You also will be able to harness the simplicity and ubiquity of the Web for your business-critical applications with the UNIFACE WebEnabler, a new component planned for Compuware’s UNIFACE application development environment. UNIFACE WebEnabler will allow developers to build applications for the Internet or private Intranets - just as easily as for other computing platforms.

Bringing enterprise computing to the Web

‘Compuware recognizes the convergence of enterprise computing and the Web. Customers are looking for ways to evolve the Internet/Intranet from the realm of static document retrieval to dynamic information processing,’ says Frank Slootman, general manager for Compuware’s UNIFACE product group. ‘The UNIFACE environment is well positioned to help foster this new era because it has a history of success in constructing business applications that are scalable, flexible, and offer high performance.’

Compuware plans to ship UNIFACE WebEnabler later this year as a separately packaged product. This new component gives any end user with a Web browser access to a UNIFACE application - without requiring developers to write additional code or requiring any UNIFACE code on the client workstation. By not having to install the application on every PC and replace it with each revision, IT organizations simplify software distribution and maintenance. These ‘thin clients’ expand the opportunities for mobile computing and other types of applications. At the same time, developers can avoid having to learn two different toolsets to deploy an application on the Web or on another platform.

To work with UNIFACE WebEnabler, developers visually paint UNIFACE forms, then deploy them on a server. UNIFACE automatically executes the business rules, accesses data sources anywhere in the global enterprise, and formats responses into dynamically generated, custom HTML documents for display on the browser. Unlike many Internet tools that focus on the graphical user interface on the front-end or the server on the back-end, UNIFACE WebEnabler eliminates both the need to write SQL or ODBC code to access data and the need to master HTML. End users can view data from any of the numerous databases and file systems supported by the UNIFACE environment. Moreover, UNIFACE’s model-driven approach to development provides the foundation for applications that are both robust and easy to change.

UNIFACE developers see usefulness

he Administrative Computing and Information Services unit at Carnegie Mellon has used UNIFACE to rewrite a payroll application that now supports more than 200 end users. Because the unit already has experience and a track record with UNIFACE, Rittiger says it makes sense to look to Compuware for an add-on to build Internet/Intranet applications. Moreover, the WebEnabler ‘sounds like it’s going to increase productivity greatly,’ says Rittiger. His colleagues otherwise face a great deal of coding in C to create Web applications.

‘I’m very excited about Compuware’s plans,’ adds Craig Silver, a consultant with Envision, a St. Louis, Missouri-based consulting firm and UNIFACE partner. ‘I’ve had three different UNIFACE sites in the past two weeks ask if I could Internet-enable their applications. After hearing Compuware’s future plans, I can tell them that we will do this easily.’

Database- and API-independent

UNIFACE WebEnabler also reflects UNIFACE’s tradition of technology independence. It allows end users to download those same application forms via the Web and execute them from any platform, including Windows and Motif, that UNIFACE works with today. As a result, developers can achieve a ‘thick client,’ processing some functions, like data validation, directly on the client. Also, the WebEnabler transparently supports multiple interfaces to different Web servers. These include CGI, NSAPI, and ISAPI, so developers can choose the application programming interface (API) best tuned to their server.

Web services available in standard product

In addition to the WebEnabler, Compuware plans to bundle some Web services into the standard UNIFACE development environment. Developers will be able to give their existing UNIFACE applications Web functionality. For instance, end users can display or browse HTML documents in a field on a UNIFACE form. They can pull up data alongside Web pages that could be graphical or multimedia.

Compuware plans to provide instrumentation for monitoring and managing UNIFACE WebEnabler from leading systems management tools like Compuware’s EcoTOOLS. This instrumentation could provide information such as the number of times a UNIFACE service is accessed, or the number of connections made to the WebEnabler. With this insight, IT organizations will be better able to tune their systems to meet performance goals.

Future Internet/Intranet plans

‘UNIFACE WebEnabler is the first step in Compuware’s strategy to help customers exploit the Internet/Intranet for enterprise computing,’ says Roy Franzen, a product manager for UNIFACE. ‘Future enhancements will make it possible to integrate Java applets into UNIFACE applications, and to use standard Web protocols to deploy those applications. These enhancements will help customers deploy extremely interactive applications on the Web, and use one computing infrastructure for both standard client/server applications and Web-based applications.’

UNIFACE developers create a single application, regardless of where it will be deployed. With the WebEnabler, UNIFACE presents the same screen in a graphical, client/server environment (above) and as an HTML-generated document (below).