World Class Objects Products

World Class Objects offers a unique set of products and services to the Visualworks Smalltalk programmer in the areas of robust client/server transaction processing and middleware for legacy data access.

The company's products include VLab which supports the front-ending of mainframe applications with reusable object interfaces and ClassMate, an advanced client/server development framework and visual toolset for building Smalltalk application components supporting, reuse, distributed function, application partitioning and transaction processing through tight integration with both commercial open systems transaction processors such as the Tuxedo as well as legacy interfaces such as EHLLAPI and APPC.

Product Objecives

The goals of the World Class Objects product set are to provide tools that recognize the evolutionary nature of reinventing the IT systems inventory and to provide pre-engineered pragmatic solutions that meets the following objectives:

Provide a state of the art development environment to enable the building of robust mission critical, distributed business applications utilizing object technology.
Address the issues involved with refurbishment and reuse of legacy application code, access to and use of existing data and promotion of gradual evolution rather then revolutionary re-deployment.
Provide high-level support for the integration of heterogeneous application topologies such as remote data access, multi-level transaction processing, transactional client-server, local PC applications, distributed functions (RPC) and distributed objects (CORBA).
Allow for the inter-mixing of distributed topologies in the context of a single application (for example, WAN/LAN, mainframe/client-server, ...).
Provide platform portability for the developed application as well as the availability of the development environment on multiple platforms.
Substantially aid in the productivity of designers and programmers through techniques and technologies such as distributed, reusable objects and application generation.

ClassMate

ClassMate supports reuse, distributed processing, application partitioning and transaction processing through tight integration with both commercial open systems transaction monitors such as Tuxedo, as well as through legacy interfaces such as HLLAPI or APPC.

ClassMate is built on an object-oriented base, but requires a minimum of OO knowledge.

ClassMate reusable application components are specified in a graphical specification environment and stored as metadata in a local repository. 4GL-like properties are specified such as data types and range checks.

Reusable VisualWorks Smalltalk components for interface, logic and data are then generated automatically from these specifications creating a transaction application framework in a local test environment which includes transaction control through the X/Open's XA protocol for distributed multi-phase commit.

At this point the developer can use a subset of the Smalltalk language in order to further specify business logic.

Target platform information is then added to these specifications such as remote service parameters, distribution points, etc. From these enhanced specifications, new components are generated that work with the specific deployment environment

ClassMate Benefits

ClassMate bring the benefits of object technology to robust client/server transaction processing application development.

ClassMate allows for the rapid prototyping of distributed application in a local development environment.

ClassMate encourages reuse through the encapsulation of business logic into reusable components.

ClassMate allows for the development of portable applications (e.g. Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroup 3.11, NT, OS/2, Mac, HP-UX, AIX, Sun Solaris, etc.)

ClassMate provides high-level support for the integration of heterogeneous application topologies such as remote data (APPC, HLLAPI), multi-level transaction processing (Tuxedo), transactional client-server.

ClassMate allows for the inter-mixing of distributed topologies in the context of a single application (for example, WAN/LAN, remote data access, distributed OLTP, mainframe/client-server, etc.).

VLab

The purpose of VLab is to ease the development of interface modules for new applications which are required to access legacy transactional applications through their terminal interface. Productivity is improved by using interactive, visual "point and click" programming techniques to automatically generate interface modules.

The VLab architecture is object oriented; written in and tightly integrated with the ParcPlace VisualWorks environment.

When constructing new applications on open systems, it is usually necessary to retrieve or modify data on existing mainframe systems. While general purpose tools are available for directly accessing this data if it is in a relational database (for example, IBM's DB2), this is not the case for legacy systems. Very large quantities of "legacy" system data are in flat, hierarchical or network databases. Direct access to and manipulation of these types of data collections is not supported by general-purpose tools.

Approaches that require the creation of special new applications on the mainframe to provide access to the new open- system application are costly and - unless the data format specifications are available and up-to-date - may be impractical. Direct modification of this data can be the source of data quality problems as the rules that govern consistency of this data are embedded in the transactional programs and are circumvented when direct remote access is provided. The usual approach to accessing this data is to emulate terminal interfaces that are already supported by existing mainframe applications using the target data.

In cases where the mainframe application is relatively simple, macro-scripting and screen-scraping tools provide a usable solution. However, if the mainframe application supports a complex set of capabilities involving multiple forms with intricate sequencing through menus and data input/output forms, the task facing the new application programmer becomes very complicated resulting in extended implementation and test and maintenance cycles.

VLab address this problem by using interactive, visual "point and click" programming techniques to automatically generate reusable interface modules. These modules provide a well-structured interface for the new application. Because the tool interacts with the mainframe application during the process of constructing the interface module, it also greatly enhances the "correctness" of the resulting modules.

VLab Benefits

VLab supports the development of reusable interface modules that encapsulate existing business data contained in legacy applications through the generation of highly portable interfaces.

VLab is written in, and tightly integrated with the ParcPlace VisualWorks environment.

VLab allows for the front-end development of modules that interface with legacy applications without specific communications protocol expertise required.

VLab provides a visual, interactive approach to development that significantly reduces the development time and improves the quality of the target application. No HLLAPI programming!

VLab has an extensible OO architecture and communications interface.

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