WebSmart uses highly productive application development techniques—such as visual design aids, templates, and intelligent wizards—that leverage your skills as a business application designer and developer. WebSmart eliminates many of the tedious, time-consuming chores of hand-coding to make you highly productive and effective. In fact, you can often write complete, Web-native applications in as little time as it would take to generate a simple screen-scraper. But the finished product is far superior; you'll be running native ILE CGI programs or Java servlets directly on the iSeries with no run-time interpreter or additional layers added to your applications. WebSmart's server-side components deliver HTML or rich-client Web pages that comprise all the features you've come to expect from commercial Web sites—beautiful graphics, drop-down menus, expanding trees, options for Flash movies, Google-like AJAX functionality, log-in pages, powerful search functions, pop-up window lookups, complete order-entry functionality, shopping carts, file maintenance tools, query tools, and more. And WebSmart supports SSL and includes native tools for 128-bit AES encryption along with iSeries user profile validation functions to allow you to create applications as secure as or more secure than any 5250 green-screen application.
WebSmart includes a native Windows application as the workbench, or IDE. This powerful yet intuitive interface allows developers to work with both major components of WebSmart applications: the visual component (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.) and the server-side component (a robust programming environment that uses a language similar to free-format RPG for writing your application logic). In addition, the IDE tightly integrates with the iSeries database, showing you file and field information and automatically updating that information when file layout changes occur. HTML design tools include mini-wizards that prompt you for everything you need (eliminating the need to know HTML syntax), drag-and-drop functionality to easily place database fields on Web pages, a visual preview page that shows an accurate representation of the final product, and real-time syntax-checking to help eliminate coding errors.
(Click diagrams to view full size)
Figure 1: Easily link files for Rapid Application Development in WebSmart.
WebSmart's templates touch much more than just the appearance of your Web pages; they encapsulate all the server-side logic required to build complete applications without coding. The intelligent wizards let you simply follow a set of prompts to design a series of connected pages that take a user through the typical steps used in business applications, such as adding or changing inventory records, entering sales transactions, creating customer accounts, maintaining hospital patient admissions information, etc.
The templates are extensible and programmable, so you can teach the tool to step you through your own customized set of design steps to produce applications that conform to your organization's standards. By customizing the templates once, you control what design steps the IDE guides you through.
Figure 2: The WebSmart IDE has powerful HTML editing tools.
WebSmart also includes powerful legacy-code conversion tools that instantly convert DDS to HTML with active content and convert RPG to WebSmart's coding environment. To modernize your Web applications, you can easily leverage entire sections of legacy code or choose only subroutines or lines of code. The conversion tool lets you view your original code and the converted code side by side, giving you a clear point of reference for the modernized application.
WebSmart has many enterprise-level features for rapid development, so teams of developers can work as effectively as one- or two-person shops. These include powerful project management and change management features such as checkout/check-in support, testing, QA and development environments, version control, archiving, and comparison.
The WebSmart Central Repository is a business and presentation rules "warehouse" that stores and manages rules attached to database components so you can further speed development by defining logic, database relations, and user-interface components up front, prior to creating any applications. The Central Repository can be shared by many developers on a server, and it supports such advanced features as inheritance. True to WebSmart's ease of use, though, you can start writing and deploying Web applications within minutes after installing the product; use of the Repository is optional.
Figure 3: This application was built in minutes with WebSmart. Use prebuilt templates or your own look and feel.
Modernizing your iSeries applications doesn't stop with WebSmart. Solutions such as Nexus, Catapult, and Clover are parts of BCD's integrated family of software that you can acquire independently or as a suite. Together, they allow your organization to take advantage of technology once available only on other servers. For example, the Nexus Web portal product provides a secure, managed framework for deploying WebSmart or other applications in a consistent Web interface, along with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities. So you can give users control over not only their traditional database-driven business applications but also content stored as Word, Excel, or Adobe PDF files. The IT department controls access to applications and documents, while granting rights to users to create more powerful pages that include capabilities such as Web access to spool files, instant messaging, and calendars. In addition, WebSmart and Nexus integrate with Catapult, BCD's unattended report distribution software. Catapult runs in batch to directly feed documents in real time to the Nexus ECM, with powerful indexing and search capabilities attached to each document.
Modernizing your iSeries applications is easier and faster than you may think. iSeries people truly understand WebSmart. This has been proven by over 1,000 organizations implementing WebSmart solutions. With WebSmart and the integrated suite of products, you can modernize your iSeries applications today.
Duncan Kenzie is President and CTO of BCD Technical Support, the development and support group for WebSmart, Nexus, Catapult, and Clover. He can be reached at
Business Computer Design, Int'l, Inc. (BCD)
Contact: Eric Figura, Director, Sales and Marketing
950 N. York Rd.
Hinsdale, IL 60521-2950
Tel: 630.986.0800
Fax: 630.986.0926
Web: http://www.bcdsoftware.com/
Email:
More than ever, there is a demand for IT to deliver innovation. Your IBM i has been an essential part of your business operations for years. However, your organization may struggle to maintain the current system and implement new projects. The thousands of customers we've worked with and surveyed state that expectations regarding the digital footprint and vision of the company are not aligned with the current IT environment.
TRY the one package that solves all your document design and printing challenges on all your platforms. Produce bar code labels, electronic forms, ad hoc reports, and RFID tags – without programming! MarkMagic is the only document design and print solution that combines report writing, WYSIWYG label and forms design, and conditional printing in one integrated product. Make sure your data survives when catastrophe hits. Request your trial now! Request Now.
Forms of ransomware has been around for over 30 years, and with more and more organizations suffering attacks each year, it continues to endure. What has made ransomware such a durable threat and what is the best way to combat it? In order to prevent ransomware, organizations must first understand how it works.
Disaster protection is vital to every business. Yet, it often consists of patched together procedures that are prone to error. From automatic backups to data encryption to media management, Robot automates the routine (yet often complex) tasks of iSeries backup and recovery, saving you time and money and making the process safer and more reliable. Automate your backups with the Robot Backup and Recovery Solution. Key features include:
Business users want new applications now. Market and regulatory pressures require faster application updates and delivery into production. Your IBM i developers may be approaching retirement, and you see no sure way to fill their positions with experienced developers. In addition, you may be caught between maintaining your existing applications and the uncertainty of moving to something new.
IT managers hoping to find new IBM i talent are discovering that the pool of experienced RPG programmers and operators or administrators with intimate knowledge of the operating system and the applications that run on it is small. This begs the question: How will you manage the platform that supports such a big part of your business? This guide offers strategies and software suggestions to help you plan IT staffing and resources and smooth the transition after your AS/400 talent retires. Read on to learn:
LATEST COMMENTS
MC Press Online