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by Duncan Kenzie
Published 06/15/2006
Everyone wants more control over their lives. For iSeries Web
developers, WebSmart comes to the rescue. WebSmart provides a managed solution
for producing true enterprise-quality Web applications—whether you have
one developer or many developers. WebSmart includes numerous high-productivity
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features that help your programming team rapidly produce iSeries-hosted Web
applications or modernize existing applications and bring them to the Web. These
include intelligent templates and wizards that guide you through a codeless
design process to create Web programs, a repository for business and
presentation rules and database relations, and legacy code conversion tools to
help migrate existing RPG logic and display file DDS to Web pages.
WebSmart's Features
The following WebSmart features support centralized,
managed development, improve productivity, and make Web programming more
enjoyable:
- Facilities for shared, enterprise-wide business rules, presentation rules,
and data models
- Facilities for shared tracking and automated updating of database design
changes
- Facilities for shared, organized development by projects and subgroups
(sets) within projects across the enterprise
- Facilities for shared templates (the building blocks for Web applications)
within projects
- Facilities for enterprise-wide change management, including check-in,
check-out, development and test environments, source code archiving, and
comparison.
Let's examine these features in more detail.
Enterprise-wide Central Repository
WebSmart's repository provides a place to associate
business rules and logic, presentation rules, and database relations with any of
your application's database files. Developers can define or change attributes in
the repository using WebSmart's PC-based IDE. The repository can be shared by
multiple developers and is always synchronized and up-to-date. For example, if
Joe adds date formatting to a database field, Sharon will automatically have
that date formatting available to her when she's working in the WebSmart IDE.
This leverages your development efforts; you define a rule once and reuse it any
number of times.
Shared Tracking and Automated Updating of Design Changes
Occasionally, you might need to change the record
layout of a file by adding more fields, changing the length of existing fields,
or changing key structures. This is especially true when building new
applications, but it's also often the case with heritage applications, too.
WebSmart helps you manage these changes by automatically applying database
design changes across the enterprise; as developers work with Web programs in
the WebSmart IDE, the tool tracks changes and notifies the developers. It also
adjusts the file layouts so you can be certain you are always working with the
most recent database design. This relieves your developers from having to manage
database layout changes, making their job less tedious and increasing their
productivity.
Shared Project Management
WebSmart lets you develop Web applications ad hoc by
storing your work wherever you choose. This is fine for developers who are just
getting started with Web development, but for enterprise development efforts,
you'll want to take advantage of WebSmart's project management features. These
features let you predefine where source and object code will be stored on your
iSeries, what the default URL is for running your applications, and how your
work is organized. For example, you could create a project called Web Order
Inquiry and place all your WebSmart programs for an order inquiry application in
this project. You can then organize this application further into environments
such as development, testing, QA, and production. WebSmart doesn't place any
constraints on how you organize your projects. You can have as many projects and
environments within projects as you choose.
 Click on graphic to view full size.
Figure 1: This CRM project has development and production
environments.
Shared Templates
WebSmart's unique intelligent templates provide real
productivity gains for your Web development team. Templates contain not only the
look and feel of your Web pages, but also the essential programming logic for
those pages, thus minimizing the amount of code you have to write. In addition,
each template has embedded within it the instructions to provide the required
prompts to a developer during the program design process. You can customize the
design process by modifying the templates. WebSmart goes even further by letting
you associate sets of templates, standard or customized, with any of the
projects you define. So, for example, you could have a specialized set of
templates associated with the Web Order Inquiry application mentioned earlier.
This has the benefit of automatically providing standards for your developers,
as well as providing them with any customized codeless design steps when
creating new WebSmart programs.
Enterprise-wide Change Management
WebSmart provides an all-important suite of change
management features. As developers work with components of an application,
WebSmart tracks who has a program locked for development. Developers can
navigate both simple lists and tree views of applications to see who is actively
working on something. This management feature also prevents more than one person
from working on the same component at the same time. You can check out, check
in, promote, or revert changes to code easily using WebSmart's change
management.
The WebSmart IDE can be integrated with some solutions from
major iSeries change management vendors, so your WebSmart development efforts
can conform to standards for other development work in your shop.
WebSmart also keeps a historical log of all development efforts so you
can track when changes were made and by whom. And you can configure WebSmart to
automatically archive your work, allowing you to easily revert to an earlier
version. It also includes a powerful source comparison tool that lets you see,
side by side, any code changes, with individual lines highlighted. This
functionality lets you track application changes at a line-by-line level. This
can be useful if a program behaves differently than it did previously, letting
you easily find code changes that might have affected the behavior.
Figure 2: WebSmart's "code compare" feature lets you track detailed
changes.
Improved Productivity And Greater User Satisfaction
The goal of all these features is not only to improve
your development team's productivity but also to produce better-quality
Web-based business applications. This will lead to greater satisfaction from
your Web applications users, resulting in greater profits for your organization.
Isn't it time you tried WebSmart?
Duncan
Kenzie is President and CTO of BCD Technical Support,
the development and support group for WebSmart,
a popular iSeries Web development tool, and Nexus, a portal product specifically
designed for iSeries, i5, and AS/400 servers. Duncan has 29 years of experience
on the midrange systems platform creating software for both green-screen and
native Web environments.
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