System iNetwork

August 26, 2008

The Magic Fit: Not Too Fat, Not Too Thin

Seeing is believing when it comes to application development and deployment. Glenn Johnson says it, sees it, and believes it. As senior vice president at Magic Software Enterprises, he believes in delivering applications seamlessly over the Internet. He sees it happening in a unique single development paradigm that removes the need to manage multiple programming languages and create separate client and server standards. This leaves folks free to focus on writing powerful application business logic. To i types, this means the power to choose how to deploy apps—whether full client or web, on-premise or on-demand, software or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or global or local.

Johnson describes Magic Software's new uniPaaS, the next generation of its eDeveloper tool, as unique in that logic execution can come either on the client side or the user side. "Usually when you develop a rich Internet application, you have to use Java on the server side and then something like Ajax on the other side. You're using two different languages to create one business application," he says. "With uniPaaS, System i customers with native green screen user interfaces can develop applications to access over the Internet with a full rich application mode."

If clients lose communication when they're trying to deploy applications over the Internet, uniPaaS comes to the rescue by maintaining the state of the application, Johnson notes. "Certain functions can continue on the client side even when communication has been broken with the server. The whole application platform is more robust than those approaches that require constant service of the client from the server."

As Magic Software Enterprises notes in its description of uniPaaS, "Where the 'Fat Client' would expand the total cost of ownership, and a 'Thin Client' would lack the required functionality and computation capacity, uniPaas's new 'Fit Client' combines the computation power of the fat client and affordability of the thin client to give the perfect fit for all business web application needs."

Johnson adds that the tool is unique because it utilizes and accesses all IBM i server side resources and capabilities that people don’t find on other platforms. "It's very much a System i-aware application, using the logic of RPG."

Vicki Hamende, application development and database editor

Posted by vhamende at August 26, 2008 12:57 PM