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).