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ARTech is Upping the Ante on GeneXus

GeneXus Yi was the star of the opening day of the IX GXalliance Meeting. Gustavo Carriquiry, ARTech's operations manager, answered questions and presented the new GeneXus version.

What does ARTech offer in this new GeneXus version? Our commitment with our customers is to offer them high development productivity, the power and the capacity to create large critical mission applications for the leading platforms in the market, based on a single design. At the same time, we aim to helping them confront the inevitable obsolescence of the development and production platforms, while preventing high migration costs and ensuring the future of their application. With GeneXus Yi, ARTech is upping the ante on the GeneXus commitment to each of these aspects.

This commitment is voiced by many technological companies today. What makes ARTech different? Yes, many companies promise similar things. The difference is that those companies need a 180º turnaround to achieve it, because as long as they continue focusing on the "knowledge of language and coding" they will be far from achieving it. Meanwhile, ARTech focuses on "business knowledge", a paradigm that GeneXus turns into a reality and which has allowed us to fulfill our commitment with our customers for over 10 years.

How does this version increase GeneXus' high productivity? GeneXus Yi includes three new features that further increase GeneXus productivity: Patterns, Business components, Master Page.

Patterns enable the generation of a set of GeneXus objects to solve a specific case or a more complex functional problem, starting from one or several GeneXus objects and a defined "pattern". ARTech provides a set of Patterns and the tool. The developers can define their own patterns, based on the features of their application or company or other factors. That means that we are adding a further tier to what we know about GeneXus and its functions, which enables an exponential increase of productivity.

Business Components enable the knowledge stored in a transaction to be reused without the need to repeat it in other GeneXus objects, with the ensuing improvement in productivity and integrity.

Master Pages are templates that make it unnecessary to establish which web components are used by each Web panel, reducing the development effort. Besides, they confer greater flexibility at the time of modifying the application because in order to add a component to the whole Web site, it will only be necessary to add it to the Master Page.

How does this Yi version increase the capacity of GeneXus to create large mission critical applications? It does it by offering more power with new features -Web Client-Side Validation, Automatic Translation, Export comparer- while keeping the focus on knowledge.

Web Client-Side Validation. The WEB interface has been criticized for its inherent rigidity in the full screen dialog when compared with the Field to Field dialog in the GUI interface. The use of JavaScripts (JS) in the navigator is a technical solution to this problem but it entails a high development cost and complex maintenance so it's not often used in sizable applications. However, using JS is not a problem for us because GeneXus represents knowledge in a knowledge base. GeneXus generates the necessary JSs to make validations in the client without resorting to the server and it grants applications a much better level of dialog at ZERO development and maintenance cost.

Automatic Translation. Multi-language applications are a market need on the rise. Not having them conspires against the business. If a company wants to publish its site on the Internet, that site will have to be in more than one language; if it is a multinational, it will surely need applications in several languages; if it is a software house, not having its solution in a given language will mean sacrificing market share. The problem is that developing and maintaining a multi-language application is cumbersome and more expensive than making it in just one language. With this feature we make the translation of a GeneXus application, as well as having a version per language or a multi-language version, just a matter of translating the texts. No programming effort is required.

Export comparer. Our business is handling knowledge. We have developed this tool within this concept, to enable a better knowledge administration and control between development teams, especially when they are large.

What new features does GeneXus Yi integrate with respect to the multi-platform development enabled by GeneXus? The platform world has been bi-polar for a long time and ARTech has been working on both poles even longer. To this aim, in the YI version we have invested essentially on improving the .NET and Java (J2EE) generators. This involves all the aspects we mentioned previously, but we have also worked on specific features of each generator.

The .NET generator of the Yi version improves data access (ADO.NET), application performance and integration with the .NET architecture.

The Java generator further deepens J2EE support, because although we have always supported some of the standards defined there, in this version we include EJB and JTA support, among others.

What advantages does GeneXus Yi add to help customers confront development and production platform obsolescence without high migration costs?Dealing with technological obsolescence and preserving the investment made on application development, requires constant improvement of the current platforms and providing support for the new platforms that have achieved a position in the market or are starting to do so. GeneXus Yi incorporates the MySQL support, a data base that has taken the lead among free distribution data bases.

On the other hand, there is a clear need, usefulness and growth in the mobile market ("Mobility") which is why we are including a .NET Mobile generator in this version that can generate applications to be run in a wide range of devices (Pocket PC and Smartphones, among others).

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