Editor's review
This software environment provides support for rapid development of software.
Let’s start with the biggest feature this application development environment is entirely free. This is a rapid application development platform for mobile web and browser based applications. It provides the support you need in an integrated fashion. This RAD platform for high speed delivery of browser and mobile web applications has support areas that facilitate developing WYSIWYG user interfaces too. Data integration is facilitated as is workflow integration. The environment gives you the facility to abstract technical complexity. Low level coding, that usually is slog work, is aided by visual design. That kind of approach also reduces the possibility of errors/bugs in the system. Necessary tool to support this browser based /web based work (whether mobile or standard web) this environment provides extensive support for XML and web services as also databases.
Significant productivity gains can easily be expected from these well thought out support functions. The tool supports development based on the Agile philosophy. That alone should provide developers with several orders of improvement on the development time. This development which needs continuous integration is supported by an integration server included in the set up. Ebase Xi is a software platform that combines user interface creation, data integration, and business process management into a single-technology development environment. It is able to provide gains in speed, agility and power, and provides a high-productivity service oriented architecture. The Business Process Manager lets you develop workflow based system that enables the automation and tracking of your business processes. Integration Server module provides a fast and easy way to create and publish industry standard web services. Several relevant integration tools are available. This is really for hardcore developers and would need some familiarization time. It is an excellent tool that gives you rich set of features.
The creators seem to have gone to just about every length to do what it says on the tin – which is to deliver a single-technology super high productivity web app development platform that speeds up WYSIWYG UI development, enterprise workflow processing and back-office integration…and yet, and here’s the smart part, doesn’t cramp your ability to build in real world sophistication when you need to.
As I say, all sounds too good to be true. But enough applause already, how does it do all this?
Well, let’s talk browser UI development. There’s a true WYSIWYG designer canvas with a range of controls to quickly layout any design you like – think DreamWeaver on steroids. Normal CSS under the covers but hey, all that’s masked with property sets and layout types that just snap everything into place without worrying about all the nasty CSS positioning stuff. In fact, once I stopped struggling and just went with the platform, designing my pages became fun…addictive even, started finding myself looking at web sites and scheming about how quickly I could lay them out in Xi. Crazy really.
Components, that is, re-usable chunks of functionality? Yep, core stuff and fully supported. Multiple languages, international settings for numbers and dates? Yes and yes. Business rules processing, sure, of course, has its own English-like processing language (called FPL) that gives you run-time control over everything you could think of around presentation control, business rules processing and data integration with other systems. Not only that if you need to you can create your own JAVA extensions (they ship an SDK for this) and call them from FPL at run-time.
And, since we’re talking integration, how about that? Well, again, the creators have gone to enormous lengths to simplify the whole subject – there’s out of the box support for databases, web services, flat files, messaging services, etc. all abstracted so that you move data in and out of your apps via simple FPL commands. Seriously, the integration piece it’s so simple it’s scary – Xi treats anything that you need to exchange data with as a Resource that you just issue FPL commands against it (like fetch, when you want some data). It doesn’t give a hoot about what the Resource points to, you just execute your command and it does its thing. To start with you feel a little redundant (after all, you’ve probably spent years learning low level tech stuff about databases and XML) but after a while you just think, yeah sure, of course, this is the way all software should work.
Team working? Deployment options? Versioning? Sure, all catered for.
Web 2.0, AJAX, mobile app development? All yes again. We didn’t do any mobile apps but there’s some funky example on their web site.
Web accessibility? Out of the box AAA compliance for all Xi apps. Ebase the company seems to be a major supplier to public sector so this looks pretty important to them
But we’ve hardly got started. What about Workflow? There in abundance I’m afraid. A cool process designer, tight integration with the UI designer for interactive tasks and FPL and their Resource technology for process routing and run-time integration. There’s parallel processing, sub-processes, escalations, wait events and system tasks (as opposed to human tasks), an API for external systems to join in. All built on top of a powerful security model that will plug in any sort of external security system for user access and authorisation.
Publishing web services? Yes, of course, and of course, so simple it was verging on ridiculous. From zero to published and available you’re looking at minutes, literally. As you might expect Xi web services are implemented in FPL, so all of the normal processing and integration functionality is right there at your finger tips.
What about performance? That must be the big issue, right? Well, I don’t think so…we didn’t do too much but according to Ebase’s web site the Xi server will scale to support a 100,000 plus concurrent users. Seems that the server is optimised to scale over a hardware cluster too so that would mean pretty well unlimited processing power if that’s your thing.
And the downsides?
Well, the designer is just in English…which could be a problem for some. Some people may prefer to code their rules in something other than FPL (coming later, according to Ebase) and a whole load of people are going to be disappointed it’s not from Microsoft or the Open Source crew.
The workflow isn’t BPMN compliant (Ebase say that that would cause too many restrictions) and the version control stuff could be a little slicker (also being addressed it would seem).
But hey, even with a couple of niggles, for the money (which is like $0 for up to 10 concurrent at run-time) this platform is just outrageously good value. And I seriously doubt that there’s anything even close out there.