i5 - rapid e-business development.

In today’s marketplace, organisations are striving to achieve competitive advantage - by driving down costs against tighter budgets, whilst increasing the productivity and efficiency of a reduced workforce. In response the web is being used to ensure employees work more effectively and collaborate better with their fellow employees, customers and suppliers.

i5 achieves this by...

·         Collecting and collating data that is captured directly or incorporated from distributed legacy system databases.

·         Delivering this data to relevant users within a common web-application.

·         Providing access to the application anywhere in the world, via any device and web-browser.

·         Providing the data in a format that is accessible and readable by other applications.

·         Applying business rules to drive and automate processes around the data and people.

Costs saved and profits delivered...

·         Realise value/profits quicker through increasingly improved development time

·         Lower development costs.

·         Single deployment – no local costs or issues as with client-server.

·         Remote maintenance – no local maintenance or support costs.

·         Thin client – less local processing power required – less PC turnover.

·         Future proof investment with backward compatibility and emerging browser & database support.

·         Leverage existing skills and support, no new programming languages to learn.

Code-free SQL to HTML. i5(formerly net.db) was one of the first point and click tools for web-enabling SQL databases. i5’s database layer seamlessly handles the SQL connectivity, whilst the presentation layer outputs the relevant HTML to suit the connecting browser and device type.

Increasingly improve development time The current release allows developers to build configurable plug-in components for re-use across multiple web applications. Built using the i5 business logic API, these seamlessly interact with any i5 page. i5 provides step by step tutorials for rapidly building these components.

i5 ships with several of these components as standard, including Drill down graphs, Multi-table update button and SQL driven datagrids. Additional components, built by Dataline and in use by corporate clients are available separately. These include an XML explorer and picture editor.

What does i5 offer?

Browser centric development. i5 provides an authoring/development environment where applications are designed and tested in a browser. An i5 server can be accessed by users and developers alike, from any platform (Windows98/NT/2000/XP, Mac, Palm, EPOC, Unix, OS/2) - and from anywhere. This thin client approach is unique, and particularly important because of the shift towards hosting through application service providers.

Rapid development. i5 is truly code-free unless business logic is required (see below). It was originally designed as a point-and-click tool for bringing the corporate database to a web site, with no knowledge of HTML or SQL being required. This aspect of its functionality has been improved with the addition of more timesaving wizards.

Multi-browser support. i5 identifies connecting browsers and customizes output to suit. This means that i5 applications support nearly all browser types without having to incorporate any browser-specific code. And whenever a new browser protocol evolves, i5 provides the support for it.

Frame Support. The standard approach given by mainstream web development tools to the support of frames is a simple one - either you use frames, or don't. As a result, website designers are constrained into building frame-free sites, or developing sites that will not work on primitive browsers. It is possible for the more dedicated designers to implement "back-out" strategies, but these tend to be laborious to create and are commonly browser specific. The additional support for frames in i5 allows the website designer to benefit from the flexibility of frame layout, safe in the knowledge that i5's presentation layer automatically handles screen display for frame-free browsers, such as mobile phones and handheld devices.

Business rules via COM
i5 has a rich API and developers can interact with all aspects of a i5 application. The interface provides everything that a developer needs to build a sophisticated web application. New features include ndxmailbox which reads incoming messages from any POP3 compliant mail server whereas ndxattachment sends and receives complex mail attachments.

Object model support. The i5 Server supports DCOM, COM and Java modules, so developers can use the object model and development tool they consider most appropriate.

Open development and integration environment. Using the i5 API, developers can create applications or incorporate other applications and data sources, using any language that supports the COM model, e.g. Visual Basic, C++, J++ and Delphi.

Text and Image transfer to mobile devices via WML/WBMP. The presentation layer in the i5 server has been extended to support Wireless Markup Language. This feature enables i5 developers to build a single e-Business application that works for mobile devices as well as in a browser environment.

Editable tables and result sets. This release of i5 supports editable tables and result sets - which simplifies the task of developing applications that require grids of editable data. These persistent data caches are held server-side to allow scrolling of data within the stateless browser environment and also enable tables of data to be populated from non-SQL data sources.

Scaleable SQL database connectivity. i5 is fundamentally database-aware and produces high-performance database-driven web sites. Supported databases include; SQL Server, Access, DB/2, Informix, MySQL, Oracle, Pervasive, SQLBase and Sybase

Support for web servers running on Linux/FreeBSD. Due to lower running costs and superior uptime statistics compared with MS Windows based web servers, Unix web servers (in particular Apache) continue to dominate the marketplace. For this reason, i5 ships with Linux/FreeBSD web components. Extending i5's OS support in this way allows interactive e-Business sites built in i5 to co-exist with an organization's existing infrastructure - be it Microsoft or Unix based.

Activity Statistics. This feature allows the service provider to extract useful and meaningful statistics about how their i5 site is accessed. The statistics supplied by the i5 server are more sophisticated than the traditional log files generated by web servers, allowing analysis of user activity, unauthorized access, database timing, browser preferences, hourly/weekly/monthly trends, errors reports etc. Statistics generated by the i5 server are in XML format, providing an open interface to other products.

High performance servers. A single i5 server can handle and support hundreds of users and dozens of applications. Server management is made easy through the use of small execution units that solve specific processes, operations, and transactions.

Scalability paths. Multiple i5 servers can be integrated to support an unlimited number of users and operations.

Load balancing. Load balancing methods are performed at the server level, assuring the best use of resources.

High availability. The i5 server is based in a true free-threaded model running and cloning scriptlets in separate spaces, providing high level of availability and minimizing failures.

Extensibility. Outlet modules provide extensibility via COM. This allows access to mainframe apps, MTS, vertical applications such as SAP, any database server, and other applications running outside of the i5 server.

Built-in security. Database authentication and authorization is automatically passed through to every browser accessing a i5 web site. This makes i5 applications very secure.

Drag and drop. Drag and drop functionality has been added to i5's arsenal of developer friendly functionality. Developers can now design profesional pages simply and quickly.

Embedded graphing engine. Hot graphs can be wizard-designed and incorporated in a i5 application. Users can drill down through these to display detail pages. Statistical graphs and charts can also be generated using i5 wizards.