UNIFACE: On track for the future

Combining ease of use, sophisticated deployment

Dear Friend:

"On Track for the Future" is the theme of this year's North American User Group conference. As such, it seems like a good time to share our directions for UNIFACE over the next 12 to 24 months and to welcome your comments. The last year has been very busy for the UNIFACE product team. UNIFACE Six is now fully deployed, offering the broadest support of computing platforms of any client/server application development tool in the marketplace. We also shipped the new UNIFACE Distributed Computing Manager (DCM) option, opening the doors to distributed computing technologies. And we'll soon release options that give UNIFACE applications efficient access to mainframe data.

As we look ahead, we carefully consider the issues that are important to you. These include rapid development, technology independence, scalability, maintainability and performance. At Compuware, we're investing to make those ideals a reality.

In their current incarnation, most of today's application development tools fall into one of two paradigms. One promotes ease and speed of development, the second sophisticated deployment. Shifting from one to the other generally involves a trade off. The easy-to-use tools facilitate rapid development, but don't permit large-scale deployment. Tools designed for large-scale deployment require a steep learning curve. Of course, each camp wants to take on characteristics of the other.

In contrast, UNIFACE strikes a balance between ease of development and sophisticated deployment. Moving forward, we will preserve and strengthen UNIFACE in both directions. Specifically, we plan to further modularize the UNIFACE architecture, transform its model-driven development environment, and extend its distributed processing capabilities.

Modular architecture

Instead of relying on a comprehensive development toolset, you may need to mix and match tools and technologies to best suit your organization's current skills and past investments. UNIFACE continues to offer unparalleled freedom to select databases, networks, GUIs and CASE tools. In the future, UNIFACE also will provide interfaces to other graphical front end development tools. In this regard, we believe that Internet technologies, such as Web browsers and platform independent script languages, will play a role in the same market segment as UNIFACE. However, we believe UNIFACE will remain the
best choice for developing applications that span multiple desktop and server platforms.

To deliver this front-end independence, we will redesign the UNIFACE architecture into components. We'll separate the graphical presentation layer from the functional application processing layer. The heart of the enterprise-scale application will stay with the unique business events, processes and rules that have nothing to do with the presentation layer of the application. UNIFACE's strength lies in its model-driven approach to creating the real core of the application.

Business model-driven

An application's ability to keep pace with changing business conditions is vital to any organization. UNIFACE promotes consistent code re-use and simplifies maintenance through the model-driven development environment. Going forward, we plan to infuse this environment with a purely business focus and provide a conduit to business modeling, re-engineering and workflow processing tools.

Working at an abstract level, UNIFACE developers start with the data model today and enrich it with application processing behaviors and presentation attributes. Data objects and models are stored in a repository for re-use, and a change to an object's central definition automatically ripples throughout the application(s) in which it's used. In the future, we will dramatically expand the UNIFACE application model to include business process objects, which specify events, actions, conditions and other descriptions of business behaviors. This creates a higher level abstraction, resulting in higher levels of productivity and maintainability.

Distributed processing

Finally, we recognize that demands for faster performance and scalability will require flexible processing across network clients and servers. As a result, our plans include the expansion of the UNIFACE environment to include "application services." Today, UNIFACE "forms" combine both presentation and application processing logic. UNIFACE application services will contain only application processing logic, enabling their efficient execution anywhere in a distributed network.

Today, UNIFACE can process forms on servers through the DCM Distributed Forms Server. The UNIFACE PolyServer--together with CORBA and OLE/COM-compliant messaging--will play an important role in our application services initiative.

In short, UNIFACE will build on what it does best. We believe UNIFACE will continue to offer the most productive environment for building mission-critical applications that are reliable, maintainable and able to exploit available technologies.

UNIFACE Technology Transition

What do you think?

Because we want UNIFACE to carry you into the future, we value your insight. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on our plans at the UNIFACE Developers Conference. If you cannot attend, feel free to share your ideas with your local Compuware representative or with the UNIFACE product team directly at uniface_info@compuware.com.

Warm regards,

Frank Slootman

General Manager, UNIFACE