Build Cloud Applications Without Hand-Coding
Build Cloud Applications Without Hand-Coding
Increasingly, developers, CTOs, IT business analysts are turning to a new, breakthrough approach for
rapidly developing robust cloud applications: Application Generation.
Iron Speed Designer builds database and reporting applications for software-as-a-service cloud
environments – without hand-coding. Simply point to an existing database and let Iron Speed Designer
generate a visually stunning, feature-rich SaaS application that is easy to customize and ready to deploy.
White Paper
March 2010
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Table of Contents
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
The reasons to do this are compelling: You don’t have to pay for any up front
deployment infrastructure and you don’t have to operate a 24 X 7 server farm
environment with all the personnel, equipment and connectivity issues. The
cloud computing vendor handles everything for you.
Still, you are responsible for building custom applications that automate your
business processes -- the processes that encapsulate your unique way of
doing business. Regardless of who hosts your applications or where they
are hosted, you still have to build the applications.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Cloud applications differ from regular applications because they are designed
from the start with cloud deployment in mind. In particular, cloud applications
must be:
This white paper describes how one application generator, Iron Speed
Designer, builds and deploys software-as-a-service applications
without hand-coding. It combines point-and-shoot application
generation with Web 2.0 functionality, speeding development and
reducing costs.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Master-
detail
pages are
among the
advanced
SaaS
application
features
generated
by Iron
Speed
Designer.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
This cloud-based
workflow application
lets users process
transactions from a
single Web page.
A brief example illustrates this point. Suppose you need to build an order
entry system that allows sales people to create, edit and retrieve sales
orders. This application might have input forms for adding and editing orders
and a page for displaying orders for selected customers.
Using Iron Speed Designer, the developer first selects the database tables
and views necessary that underpin the application. Next, he selects the
page types he wishes to create for the selected tables. When ready, the
developer lets Iron Speed Designer generate the desired Web pages, source
code and SQL, including code for all of the Web pages, controls, and
database connectivity infrastructure.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Iron Speed Designer generates complex user interfaces and all the
supporting code and SQL, without you having to design pages or write any
code. Using Iron Speed Designer, a custom, working application—not just a
prototype or individual components—is quickly generated.
Let’s take a step by step walkthrough of how Iron Speed Designer generates
a software-as-a-service application.
The first step is selecting a page style. Page styles provide a uniform look-
and-feel across your entire application without hand-coding each page.
Choose between 27 different page styles to apply a uniform look and feel across your entire
application without hand-coding each page.
You can, of course, customize page styles as well as create your own
custom styles, a common practice in larger organizations wishing to adopt a
look and feel consistent with their corporate colors. One important benefit is
the consistency between applications that most users appreciate because it
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
reduces their overall learning curve; one application looks, feels and
operates like the others.
The second step is selecting the databases you’d like to use in your
application. Using your database schema as input, Iron Speed Designer
generates data-bound controls, data access and transaction management
code, and SQL queries for every page and component that access the
database.
The Application Wizard in Iron Speed Designer generates a complete data access layer for
each selected database. Applications may contain multiple databases.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Basic page types reflect the basic operations performed with any database
table: Create record, Retrieve record, Update record and Delete record –
sometimes referred to as C/R/U/D pages.
Add Record – a page for inputting data records.
Edit Record – a page for editing data in an individual record.
Show Record – a page for viewing data from one or more queries.
Show Table – a paginated, interactive report view of a query’s data.
Edit Table – an editable data grid useful for editing a quantity of records.
The Application Wizard in Iron Speed Designer generates sophisticated Web 2.0 pages from
selected database tables and views.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Next, choose the human languages you’d like in your application. Iron Speed
Designer supports multilingual applications out-of-the-box and generates a
‘select language’ application page for your end-users.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
In the final step, select basic application information such as the application’s
name, code generation language (C# or Visual Basic .NET) and a few other
options.
The Application Wizard in Iron Speed Designer generates sophisticated Web 2.0 pages from
selected database tables and views.
Finally, after completing the wizard steps, Iron Speed Designer generates
your application using an N-tier architecture that scales easily:
Web pages — the Web pages comprising your application.
Presentation Layer — the user interface code that puts data into and
gets data from the Web page controls.
Application or Business Layer — an initially empty layer for adding code
customizations, if any.
Data Access Layer — SQL and transaction management code.
Database Layer — database server-resident stored procedures.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
All generated pages are automatically linked together with a menu navigation
structure, providing an out-of-the-box application with no additional coding
required.
Web 2.0 features extend beyond page types to the components in those
pages. These components might include rich text editors, tree controls,
multi-level menus and tabbed panels for data input and display. Complex
navigation defines Web 2.0 applications with features such as multi-step
wizards for data collection and workflow processes governed by application
user interaction.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Application generation
encourages an iterative
development style that
includes regeneration
that preserves
customizations you have
made.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
While Iron Speed Designer can make many intelligent assumptions, it can’t
always create the optimal page layout or even decide the best compliment of
fields to include on a page and which ones to omit. So no matter what, you
need to customize page layout in a manner that doesn’t negate the benefits
achieved by application generation.
An intuitive Excel-like
layout spreadsheet
makes page
customization easy.
There is no HTML or
ASPX to learn!
Additional data bound controls are easily added by dragging them from the
Toolbox onto the layout spreadsheet. You can, for example, drag complete
panels – parent or child, record or table – onto your page, as well as third-
party controls and other components. No hand-coding is required.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Finally, a ‘cell editor’ is used for adding any text, custom HTML, ASP.NET
tags, or JavaScript to a cell. Iron Speed Designer preserves this custom
content and regenerates it as part of the page. The Cell Editor also contains
a toolbar for common formatting operations, such as font, font size,
boldfacing, text and background colors and cell borders.
The Cell Editor eliminates the need to understand the overall HTML structure
of the Web page. Instead, you only need focus on the modest modifications
you make within an individual cell – a very small portion of the page. This
greatly reduces the need for the developer to have comprehensive HTML or
ASPX knowledge.
You may want to add custom business logic, add additional user interface
components or integrate with external systems. To accommodate this, the
generated code must readable, easy-to-understand and easy-to-customize;
otherwise the code won’t be trusted and the time savings achieved by
application generation are lost.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Iron Speed Designer takes an innovative approach called ‘code tabs’ that
combines the page layout spreadsheet with a code editor. Selecting a
specific user interface component in the layout spreadsheet displays relevant
code methods in a set of code tabs displayed below the layout spreadsheet.
Selecting a page
control displays
relevant code
methods in a set of
code tabs.
While this mechanism can’t display all possible code methods – there would
be way too many code tabs – it does highlight the most commonly
customized ones. This focuses your attention on the important code
methods, solving the ‘forest from the trees’ problem of trying to assimilate a
very large body of code.
The class hierarchies generated by Iron Speed Designer derive from the
base classes in the .NET Framework. Simply subclass the appropriate page,
control or database class and add your code customization. The class
hierarchy means your code customizations have access to the full
functionality of the generated application, all the way down to the .NET
framework.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
The class hierarchy for a typical Web page generated by Iron Speed Designer.
You can override any of the functions in either the generated application
classes or the .NET Framework classes, or write your own methods in
combination with the existing base class methods. Then, regenerate the
application to reflect your customizations.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Automatically generating
features like role-based
security save many hours
of programming.
Basic user authentication governs who can sign into the application. A valid
user name and password is required to sign in, giving you control over who
can access your application.
Use the Application Security Wizard to configure authentication and authorization control in your
application.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
information and issue refunds or credits. With Iron Speed Designer, users
can be assigned multiple roles, effectively giving them tailored access.
Configure access to specific pages in the Pages step of the Application Security Wizard.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
Generating an MSI installer for your application is by far the easiest and best
way to deploy your application into a production cloud environment. MSI
installers are self-contained “executable” installation programs you copy and
run on your production machine to install your application. The MSI installer
generated by Iron Speed Designer bundles all necessary application files
except your database into a single MSI file.
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BUILD CLOUD APPLICATIONS WITHOUT HAND-CODING
creating a virtual directory for your application and installing any database
stored procedures.
Deployment projects give you more customized control over your installation,
though they require more knowledge and experience. They are best for
environments where your IT systems administrator does not allow MSI
installers (or other setup programs) to be run or environments where an
installation program does not have permission to create a virtual directory or
install stored procedures. Deployment projects are also useful when your
application is a module in a larger system – hence the DLL format – and is
not a stand-alone application.
Manual deployment is best for truly custom environments where you need to
control exactly which files are placed where. This method is not
recommended for novices but is possible with Iron Speed Designer.
Building cloud applications can be easy! Let us show you how Iron Speed
Designer can accelerate your Cloud application development by eliminating
hand-coding. The ROI delivered by Iron Speed Designer means more
efficient utilization of key personnel, reduced development and testing time,
and more rapid deployment of robust applications.
Telephone: 1-408-228-3400
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Please send comments, suggestions and ideas regarding this white paper to
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