Rapid Application
Development
Progress Software Special Edition
by Paul Nashawaty
Senior Product Marketing Strategist
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Introduction
A
cloud-based approach with a Platform as a Service (PaaS) platform that empowers you with the capability to rapidly develop applications can help unleash your devel-oper productivity and creativity while delighting your custom-ers and employees.In fact, recent industry research supports this claim by show-ing that 93 percent of the organizations that adopted a PaaS approach experienced improvement of development whereas 95 percent saw improvement in overall deployment of new applications. More than 50 percent experienced reduced development costs.
Imagine the possibilities with a rapid application development approach that empowers you to
✓ Quickly create and deploy business applications that easily connect to all your data and aren’t limited by device or cloud
✓ Rapidly develop, deploy, and easily host web and mobile applications using a cloud-native, point-and-click, and drag-and-drop development approach
✓ Simplify the development, deployment, and management of business applications to improve graphical user inter-face (GUI)-style developer productivity
✓ Streamline the development and deployment of business applications to unleash the expertise of your technical business users, allowing them to co-create their own apps and proactively solve your organization’s most pressing challenges
✓ Free your GUI-style developers and technical business users to develop applications without worrying about infrastructure constraints or traditional development activ-ities (such as build, compile, deploy, and version control) ✓ Let your GUI-style developers and technical business
users get started with just a browser and an Internet connection
✓ Develop applications one time — for all your devices, including support for mobile-specific application experi-ence without custom device code
✓ Adopt a model-driven approach to simplify application development that allows your business users to under-stand the business domain to develop the model and automatically generates the user interface based on the application model
✓ Leverage a consistent set of back-end application ser-vices as the basis for your cross-channel development (web + mobile + other form factors)
To help your business meet today’s intense demand for appli-cations, you need to understand the advantages of a PaaS approach. That’s where Rapid Application Development For
Dummies, Progress Software Special Edition can help.
About This Book
Talking about rapid application development and actually executing on it are two very different things. What if you could create applications in days instead of months? What if you could continuously and easily connect to all your data, without complex reconfigurations? And what if you could more easily manage and share your data? That’s where Rapid Application
For Dummies, Progress Software Special Edition comes in.
Icons Used in This Book
You’ll notice three icons designed to highlight special information:
Flagging a tip is akin to kicking you under the table to alert you so you don’t overlook something helpful.
This icon helps you remember these important tidbits and facts to store away for future reference.
This book was done in partnership with and on behalf of Progress Software. This icon highlights stories of how the Progress
Software rapid application deployment environment has helped clients develop solutions more quickly and with less effort.
Your Foundation to Rapid
Application Development:
Just the Basics
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding rapid application development with Progress Pacific ▶ Identifying today’s application development business challenges ▶ Realizing the value of a PaaS approach
▶ Taking your business to the next level
W
hen it comes to application development, slow and steady doesn’t win the race. Whether you’re an experienced developer or a technically savvy business user, you can benefit from adopting a rapid application develop-ment approach from today’s next generation of Platform as a Service (PaaS) from Progress Software.Progress Pacific is a cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS)
that lets you quickly build and manage powerful business apps on the web, any cloud, or mobile device. Using the power of cloud services for rapid application development, the Pacific platform can help create new opportunities for you. Progress helps you use your existing IT investment and extend your applications to move your organization to the next level.
This chapter serves as your jumping-off point into the world of rapid application development.
Riding the Waves of Change
to Transform Your Business
Technology is at the heart of the epic changes that people around the world are experiencing, including the way they con-nect, how they communicate, and the way they do business. The business arena is now global, 24/7, and highly competi-tive for the smallest piece of market share. Innovation is a key driver, but in business nothing remains static. As soon as you come up with one phenomenal idea, there’s pressure to antici-pate what your company or your customers will want next. The same holds true for business applications. No sooner do you finish delivering a new app to the market, then the pressure is on to make it better, faster, and more competitive — and to then to come up with the next big thing.
To keep pace with today’s on-demand and increasingly connected world, companies need a simple way to create applications fast, without relying on deep technical skills, expensive IT resources, or long development projects. Applications must connect to criti-cal information in real time. And to work seamlessly on the web or mobile devices, you need flexible deployment options. You can rely on cloud technology to help you meet and keep ahead of the demand to deliver more applications for your business. The rest of this chapter takes a closer look at what cloud technology is and how adopting this approach can ben-efit your organization in the rapid creation of apps.
Getting on Board with
Cloud Technology
You can forget about the old school development approach. PaaS is a cloud computing approach that offers businesses the foundation for a speedy application development solu-tion. With its capability to provide infrastructure and software on demand, as a service, the cloud gets rid of the potentially slow and costly steps required to get software up and running. At the same time, a cloud approach helps reduce long-term maintenance and licensing costs while providing you with access to the latest software innovation.
But building or migrating applications in the cloud can also be daunting. Often, doing so requires a significant investment in time and money to beef up infrastructure and developer skills for cloud migration. You can also get locked into one particu-lar vendor and then find yourself unable to expand to new markets. And you can suddenly discover that the need to con-nect your application to a number of other systems outstrips your capability to keep up.
The following sections explain what it means to use cloud technology, how cloud technology can help your business, how you can make your vision a reality, and how you can overcome potential challenges to build your apps.
Understanding the value
of the Pacific platform
The Pacific platform creates a whole new world of enterprise opportunities for you to pursue — all inspired by the unique capabilities of this new platform. But what is Pacific exactly? And how can it benefit you?
Pacific is a powerful cloud-based technology platform that can help dramatically reduce your total cost of ownership
(TCO) — a financial estimate intended to help determine the
overall cost — by streamlining your application development and simplifying your infrastructure.
The Pacific PaaS offers on-premise solutions within the enterprise network, in the cloud (public, private, hybrid), or both — all while providing you development and deployment options.
PaaS adoption growing briskly
Research firm Technavio projects that the global PaaS market will top $6 billion by 2016. The growth rate is projected to be more than 48 percent
per year for the next four years. Gartner valued the worldwide PaaS market at $1.2 billion in 2012, up from $900 million in 2011.
Rapidly turning ideas
into business reality
The Pacific PaaS provides an agile, cost-efficient application deployment and development solution with high productivity and high control options — or both — for all types of develop-ers, including business users.
Pacific is comprised of the following key products (see Figure 1-1):
✓ Rapid application development with Progress Rollbase: You can develop and deliver web and mobile business applications with minimal coding in this cloud-based platform, reducing time to market. Rollbase enables rapid application development, making application cre-ation significantly faster than with traditional software development methods. Business applications can go from idea to reality faster with innovative point-and-click and drag-and-drop tools in a standard browser, saving time and money while also providing deployment freedom. Rollbase is so intuitive that even if you’re not a traditional developer, it can empower you to develop and manage applications. (See Chapters 2 and 3 for more information.)
✓ Data integration with Progress DataDirect Cloud: Optimize your business applications with real-time, easy, secure connectivity to powerful data with this technol-ogy. You can gain access to sources of information, such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, through standards-based interfaces for use in your applications or favorite Business Intelligence reporting tools. DataDirect Cloud allows faster access and integration by managing the complexities of database connectivity so that you can focus on actually applying all of that valuable infor-mation to your business. (Check out Chapter 2 for more information.)
✓ Data management with Progress Easyl: This data
man-agement tool helps empower your business with data-driven decision making and significantly simplifies the process of reporting on your organizational data. With a design focused on simplicity and self-service, Easyl helps
users access, blend, and report on data, spanning many different business applications and data sources like CRM, purchasing, or a data warehouse, so that you can share, sync, and collaborate with other users without expensive data integration projects. (Head to Chapter 2 for additional information.)
✓ High-control deployment options with Progress Modulus: Progress Modulus provides hosted or private
PaaS options for developers, enabling them to quickly and easily deploy, scale, and monitor data-intensive, real-time applications using powerful, rapidly growing Node. js and MongoDB technologies. MongoDB is the leading NoSQL database system and is designed for scalability, performance, and high availability.
Node.js is designed for easily building high-performing, scalable network applications using the ubiquitous JavaScript programming language. Through Modulus, Pacific gives you options regarding rapid application development and control platforms with easy-to-use integration between the two. This expands your devel-opment pool because it means that all your developers, regardless of their skill level, can participate in applica-tion development. They can choose whether to write custom code or use a visual development approach for any portion of their applications.
✓ Business rules management with Progress Corticon:
Pacific also offers an industry-leading business rules management system. Corticon enables you to identify, automate, and deploy automated business rules and decision systems in collaboration with IT, without the need for expensive custom coding. (Go to Chapter 2 for more information.)
✓ Traditional application development with Progress OpenEdge: This proven technology is designed for
tradi-tional application development. Closely aligned with the Pacific suite of products, its database can be used for the backend for Rollbase. In addition, Rollbase and Modulus applications can leverage OpenEdge business logic and data for easy integration between new applications and existing OpenEdge applications. This book focuses on the Pacific platform components. To learn more about OpenEdge, visit www.progress.com/products/ openedge.
Figure 1-1: Progress Pacific PaaS components.
Pacific PaaS offers a fundamental new approach that gives businesses the freedom and the power to rapidly innovate with new cloud-enabled applications to drive business growth and expansion, increase revenue, and create differentiation from the competition. Pacific powers the rapid creation and deployment of robust business applications that are driven by data and unlimited by device or cloud. Pacific gives you the freedom to choose the data sources, deployment environ-ments, and business logic that best fit your needs. In other words, Pacific lets you drive your business, not technology. Rollbase, part of the Pacific platform, is the technology that also allows you to build applications for any mobile device or cloud platform. For example, say that you’re a worldwide company building an inventory management system that must be available in all your facilities. In the United States, you could run that application on Amazon cloud. In Japan, you could deploy the application on an in-country public cloud. In Germany, you may want to run the application on a private cloud. With Pacific, you can build applications for any device and deploy, run, and manage the applications on any cloud platform.
Solving your biggest challenges
with Pacific
Pacific makes the entire process of developing, deploying, and managing applications simple. Pacific generates rich user interfaces automatically so you can concentrate on your app. Templates and drag-and-drop tools make things even faster, empowering both IT and business users to develop applica-tions. Simplified connections to important information keep your application in tune with your business.
With Pacific, your business is never held back by technology. Developers and business users are able to dive right in and design, develop and deploy ideas, and innovate — all from one platform with very little, if any, coding. Pacific helps you tap into all your in-house thought leadership to differentiate your business in today’s competitive marketplace.
Comprehending the benefits
of the Pacific platform
The Pacific platform can help your organization realize the fol-lowing benefits.
Accelerate time to market
The advantage of a modern application development is the immediate capability to turn ideas into deployed solutions. Your customers and employees want to move from a “What if?” to a “Now I can” mind-set — today, not tomorrow. Pacific includes a rapid application development platform using model-driven development that works within a web browser. Using visual tools, both developers and business users can build web and mobile apps with pointing and clicking of pre-defined objects or chunks of information and then dragging and dropping — requiring as much as 80 percent less code.
Quickly and easily connect to mobile devices
A simple one-click option enables you to mobilize your apps quickly for mobile web deployment. Or you can build mobile-specific apps for any device through an intuitive visual inter-face. Pacific allows you to publish your application to app stores for users to access in a familiar way. And with push notification technology, you can increase and enhance engage-ment with your mobile app users.
Easily access and connect to all your data sources
Data isn’t everything — it’s the only thing that matters to users. With Pacific, your application can tap into most information sources available in the cloud or on-premise to develop automated, context-aware applications. It lets you rapidly connect to all your important data sources, no matter where they reside, through a single interface. Whether con-necting to information in the cloud or on-premise or both, you
can add new data sources without having to rewrite code. And you can do both securely, without having to break through the firewall.
Share and manage your data to improve
and accelerate decision making
You need to eliminate those individual silos of information held in various business units that make it difficult to analyze critical areas of your operations. With Pacific, organizations are empowered to easily access, share, and combine data with a self-service approach to data management.
Pacific gives them what they need, right when they need it to quickly and easily build shareable reports from a wide variety of data marts. This integrated data offers you a 360-degree view of your customer, a more accurate measurement of your marketing execution, and insight into the pulse of your sales team to provide you the differentiation that you need to ignite your business.
Using a Proven Approach to
Take Your Business to the
Next Level
Progress Pacific starts by assisting you on your cloud invest-ment journey. With the company’s extensive history in appli-cation development, Pacific understands this investment and your desire to adapt applications based on your current infrastructure and current needs. Progress has a comprehen-sive road map designed to help you identify applications, and understand where they are today and prepare them for tomorrow.
This journey requires planning and execution, which is where you can leverage the Pacific platform to maximize results with minimal impact. Figure 1-2 shows you the stages that applica-tions go through in the journey from on-premise to the cloud.
Figure 1-2: Evolving from on-premise to the cloud.
When partnering with clients, Progress uses a clearly defined strategy and outlines the road map to success, as shown in Figure 1-3. You can use this phased approach, regardless of where you are in your cloud investment journey.
Dominating a ripe market by moving an
ERP application to the cloud: FreshERP
Imagine running a business that requires stocking and emptying a dis-tribution center the size of five foot-ball fields every single day, or taking and filling orders all day across mul-tiple countries on millions of pieces of produce, or managing a fleet of 250 trucks transporting millions of pieces of produce each week across Europe. That’s the reality for many of FreshERP’s customers, which include growers, cold stores, ship-ping companies, importers, export-ers, wholesalexport-ers, and supermarkets. The company’s Fresh4Fruit ERP system enables these global distribution orga-nizations to optimize their operations across purchasing, sales, warehouse management, logistics, and customer service. FreshERP recently migrated its successful 30-year old Progress OpenEdge-based ERP application to the cloud, using Progress Pacific to capitalize on the tremendous poten-tial of the European SMB market and to attract new enterprise-level cus-tomers with features, such as mobility and Business Process Management (BPM). FreshERP is the first to offer a cloud-based solution to the industry and anticipates the change will have a dramatic effect on its business. With Progress Pacific, FreshERP looks for the following to happen: ✓ FreshERP expects to double its
revenue by the beginning of 2015 as a result of using Pacific.
✓ The company has accelerated its time to market, migrating more than two million lines of code in just nine months with Progress Pacific versus using IBM and at ten times the reduced cost. ✓ FreshERP’s application can now
run on any server or operating system, in the cloud, and on any mobile device — saving its cus-tomers significant time and costs. ✓ The organization is extending its
footprint into new sectors and plans to dominate the small-to-midsized-business (SMB) market within the next couple of years. ✓ Companies can be up and
run-ning on FreshERP’s system within minutes versus months and at a much lower cost versus with its competitors’ on-premise solutions.
Here’s what the owner and commer-cial director of FreshERP, B.V., said: “Progress Pacific offers the most complete platform for the develop-ment and managedevelop-ment of process-driven applications. Progress is a one-stop-shop with a clear cloud focus, offering an entire solution stack . . . that we can leverage to continue to innovate our application and drive a competitive edge. . . . For us, Progress Pacific is like a vast ocean — wherever we want to go, Progress Pacific will take us there.”
Simplifying Rapid
Application Development
In This Chapter
▶ Examining Progress Rollbase
▶ Understanding cloud technology with Platform as a Service (PaaS) ▶ Exploring the ins and outs of Progress Direct Cloud
▶ Focusing on Progress Easyl ▶ Using Progress Modulus
▶ Driving decision management with Progress Corticon
T
his chapter explores the components of the integrated Progress Pacific platform, including Rollbase, DataDirect Cloud, and Easyl. Rollbase is the cornerstone of Progress Pacific and provides an easy-to-use, intuitive, web-based con-sole that lets experienced developers or technically proficient business users rapidly build rich enterprise, web, and mobile applications. This chapter gives you a look at how easy it is to get started with Pacific to create powerful, data-centric appli-cations that delight your customers. This chapter also looks at Progress Modulus and the high-control Node.js capabilities and the business rules management capabilities in Progress Corticon.Looking At Progress Rollbase
Rapid application development using Progress Rollbase gives you an integrated platform for creating, customizing, and sharing web-based business applications. Rollbase was designed from the ground up as a web-based applicationplatform for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and enter-prises, as well as departments and groups within larger organizations.
Rollbase applications run online in one integrated environ-ment, sharing a common security model, data model, and user interface. Any number of users in your organization can access — anytime, anywhere — Rollbase as a development platform and Rollbase applications. You don’t have to buy or install any hardware or software. The only technical require-ments that your organization needs are an Internet connec-tion and an up-to-date Internet browser.
Getting started is easy. The Progress Rollbase Application Directory provides an online exchange where you can browse, test drive, and install basic, prebuilt applications and applica-tion templates. They include a comprehensive CRM system, a full suite of integrated HR applications (for managing employees, paid-time-off requests, assets, travel requests, and expenses, courses and classes, policies, and violations), and a bug-tracking system — and others are continually being added.
After it’s installed, you can customize any Rollbase applica-tion to meet your specific business needs, using easy-to-learn drag-and-drop and point-and-click tools. After you become familiar with Rollbase, you can use these same tools to build your own custom applications from scratch, all without leav-ing your browser.
By design, Rollbase helps further streamline the develop-ment process while offering you flexibility and customization options when building robust applications, including the fol-lowing features:
✓ Customizable UI (pages, menus, and portals) ✓ Reporting (views, reports, charts, and gauges) ✓ Workflow (triggers and actions)
✓ Data integration (Simple Object Access Protocol, or SOAP, and Representational State Transfer or REST application programming interfaces or APIs)
✓ Security and access control (roles and permissions) Progress offers Rollbase outside the Pacific platform as well for both hosted and private cloud environments. Private
cloud users install Rollbase development and runtime com-ponents on their own network. Visit www.progress.com/ rollbase for more information or call 800-477-6473 for more information.
These sections take a closer look at PaaS and Rollbase and Rollbase Mobile and how they can benefit your organization.
Getting the 4-1-1 on PaaS
Progress Rollbase exemplifies Platform as a Service (PaaS), where software infrastructure is provided as on-demand web-based services. Some PaaS offerings enable program-mers to build applications, without having to worry about buying or managing any hardware or software other than their own.
Rollbase takes PaaS to a new level with its easy-to-use GUI, allowing you to strategically enable all your developers, including experienced and your less experienced citizen
devel-opers (those develdevel-opers who are less proficient in coding as
well as technical business users) to build and deploy custom web-based applications in addition to these services without necessarily writing much, if any, actual code.
Rollbase allows your business to focus on providing business value to your users. It relieves you of the expensive, complex, and time-consuming tasks of managing the underlying soft-ware and infrastructure.
Going mobile
Progress Rollbase Mobile is a tool for the development of both web-based and mobile business applications. Using an integrated, model-driven authoring environment, your com-pany can enable your customers to deliver exceptional mobile user experiences. The following are some of Rollbase Mobile’s features:
✓ Develop apps in a class development environment. You
can leverage a single integrated platform through a web browser to build the application model and web user experience using a drag-and-drop and point-and-click development environment. Progress Rollbase Mobile
automatically generates all the back-end services that are needed to support your mobile app.
✓ Utilize the device-independent Mobile App Builder.
You can build mobile front-end applications compatible with iOS, Android, and other operating systems because the Mobile App Builder is completely integrated in the Progress Rollbase environment. You also can customize your applications to support standard technologies, such as HTML5 and JavaScript.
✓ Leverage existing assets. Progress Rollbase Mobile
auto-matically generates the application services that form the foundation for your mobile applications. For existing assets and applications, you can leverage web services and JavaScript Data Objects for easy interaction from your mobile client.
✓ Add complex business logic. Take advantage of business
logic that is hosted by Progress Rollbase Mobile or lever-age existing back-end services. For more complex appli-cation logic requirements, use an open standards-based development language (JavaScript).
✓ Improve user satisfaction. Add simple data integration
to an even wider array of data sources. Now you can push notifications to your application users and mes-sage an individual or an entire group of users based on business rules you set. You can also empower users to collaborate and report on their own data using Progress Easyl. (Refer to the later section, “Grasping the Basics of Easyl,” for more information on Easyl.)
✓ Use hybrid apps. Support various types of apps
with-out writing device-specific code. Build HTML5 or native applications. You get a rich user experience and choice of deployment options, including the capability to post in Apple and Android stores — without the hassle of build-ing the same app over and over again.
Rollbase Mobile gives your organization the following benefits as well:
✓ Easily assemble, deploy, and manage mobile applications — including the entire application infrastructure.
✓ Leverage on-premise and cloud-based data sources as the foundation for your mobile apps.
✓ Build powerful, visually compelling apps using a visual developer and standard technologies, such as HTML5 and JavaScript.
✓ Support HTML5 applications or native applications using a hybrid architecture that eliminates costly device- specific coding.
✓ Provide an intuitive, native mobile experience using a hybrid architecture that eliminates costly, device-specific coding.
Knowing What Progress
Data-Direct Cloud Is All about
Part of the Pacific portfolio, Progress DataDirect Cloud pro-vides easy, lightning-fast connectivity to all your data sources, including SaaS apps, big data stores, relational databases, and more, using a single Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) or Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver, or an Open Data protocol (OData)-based API.
DataDirect Cloud is instantly compatible with your business applications so there’s no configuration hassle. With its single programming interface that eliminates the need to manage a variety of ever-changing APIs, developers pick up speed and range. Business users can get the data that they need for com-plex issues, as they need it. In other words, DataDirect Cloud manages the complexities of database connectivity so you can focus on actually applying all that valuable data to enhance the value of your applications.
The following sections examine how DataDirect Cloud can ease data connectivity and the different ways for connectivity.
Simplifying your data
connectivity
DataDirect Cloud simplifies access to virtually all your data managed by cloud services, such as Salesforce.com, Oracle RightNow, Apache Hadoop, and Oracle Eloqua, as well as your on-premise data, regardless of the source. This capability
becomes crucial when, for example, your organization needs to use a reporting application to predict travel budgets by analyzing travel data stored in the cloud or needs to analyze data for forecasting sales revenue from your CRM application. As shown in Figure 2-1, DataDirect Cloud delivers fast con-nectivity to a wide range of data sources — all with simple configuration instead of extensive coding.
Figure 2-1: DataDirect Cloud components and how they provide access to
cloud data.
Identifying components and
connectivity options
DataDirect Cloud includes the following components and the different ways to connect:
✓ The cloud connectivity service: It provides access to the cloud data store. The connectivity service abstracts the source from the target of the data, which allows you to add target applications or swap them without changing the cloud data store or the application using cloud data. ✓ The optional on-premise connector: This feature allows
you to access data securely for supported data stores on your local network without opening ports or otherwise reconfiguring your firewall. The cloud drivers manage
communication between your applications and the cloud connectivity service:
✓ Progress DataDirect Cloud Driver for JDBC: This Type
5 JDBC driver enables Java applications to interact with any supported data store and delivers the fastest, most scalable performance.
✓ Progress DataDirect Cloud Driver for ODBC: This driver enables applications using ODBC to interact with any sup-ported data store and delivers the fastest, most scalable performance.
✓ OData service: For mobile and web applications requir-ing web services, this service is available. OData is a data-access protocol initially defined by Microsoft. Versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 are released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. Version 4.0 is being stan-dardized at OASIS and was released in March 2014. This protocol is designed to provide standard CRUD access to a data source via a website. It is similar to JDBC and ODBC although OData is not limited to SQL databases. DataDirect Cloud offers standards-based connectivity to a wide variety of applications, databases, and platforms. It con-nects your dashboard, analytics, and ETL directly to your data, including (as of August 2014):
✓ ADABAS ✓ Apache Hive ✓ Cassandra ✓ Clipper ✓ Database.com ✓ dBase ✓ FinancialForce ✓ Force.com applications ✓ Greenplum ✓ Hadoop ✓ HubSpot ✓ IBM CICS ✓ IBM DB2 ✓ IMS/DB, IMS/TM ✓ Informix ✓ Microsoft Dynamics ✓ Microsoft SQL Azure ✓ Microsoft SQL Server ✓ MongoDB ✓ MySQL ✓ Natural ✓ Oracle DB ✓ Oracle Eloqua ✓ Oracle RightNow
✓ PostgreSQL ✓ Progress OpenEdge ✓ Progress Rollbase ✓ ServiceMAX ✓ SQLBase ✓ Sybase ✓ Teradata ✓ Veeva CRM ✓ VSAM
Grasping the Basics
of Easyl
Progress Easyl, also part of the Pacific platform, is a new kind of cloud-based data integration tool that empowers your business to break open data silos, overcome integration challenges, and combine and present data in meaningful and compelling new ways. Easyl is a self-service approach that, through a web-based console, gives you direct access to all the data that lives throughout your organization, wherever it resides. Easyl brings it all together to dramatically sim-plify the process by accessing, cleansing, blending, and then reporting on it.
Easyl puts the power of data management, integration, and collaboration into the hands of business professionals throughout your organization. More specifically, Easyl enables you to collate accurate, timely data to populate today’s pow-erful visualization and reporting tools. It lets you create and deliver accurate, effective reports and analytics to ensure that your marketing and sales organizations run efficiently as a fully accountable business — performance, financial man-agement, strategic planning, marketing resources, and skills assessment. Easyl helps give you an in-depth view of your campaigns, identify key trends from your prospects, and track the full progression from lead to close. Easyl also can assist marketing and sales operations teams use data integration and data sharing to assemble compelling reports and help them achieve their numbers. Refer to Figure 2-2 for a snapshot of Easyl.
Figure 2-2: The components of Easyl.
Choose from the following solutions to discover how Easyl can solve your most daunting of data management challenges:
✓ Easyl Solutions for Marketing Operations: You can get a 360-degree view of your campaigns, identify key trends from your prospects, and track the full progression from lead to close. Easyl can help your marketing opera-tion use data integraopera-tion and data sharing to assemble meaningful reports quickly to help them achieve their numbers.
✓ Easyl Solutions for Sales Operations: You can shine a
light into details about your key accounts, track the effec-tiveness of your team, and measure the sales forecast and pipeline contribution by campaign. Easyl can help your sales operation team function at full potential with the power of data integration and data sharing.
✓ Easyl for ISVs: You can build reports that span tenants or provide your customers with the self-service reporting that they need. Your application is just one of many that your customers use. With Easyl, you give them the tools that they need to correlate data and build reports from across their entire application infrastructure. Easyl can help ISVs delight their customers and build new streams of revenue.
✓ Easyl Solutions for Customer Support Operations: You can highlight key customer issues, analyze ticket resolu-tion times, and identify problems before they become escalations. Easyl can help your customer support team leverage data integration and data sharing to improve customer satisfaction levels.
Eyeing Progress Modulus
Progress Pacific offers the Modulus platform as a hosted service. Enterprises can also deploy it in public, private, and hybrid clouds as well as in an on-premise infrastructure. Modulus Enterprise is the first and only enterprise Node.js PaaS available as a licensed product, allowing businesses and ISVs to deploy next-generation apps faster and at a lower total cost. With Modulus, your organization can spend more time creating and modernizing apps and less time worrying about deployment infrastructure.
JavaScript usage and demand is increasing faster than any other language, in no small part from the growing popularity of Node.js as well as popular user interface (UI) frameworks like jQuery. In fact, JavaScript is a ubiquitous language, well known by millions of developers. Node.js applications are written in JavaScript, a fully functional programming language, and can be run within the Node.js runtime on OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux with no changes. Node.js is a server-side runtime that compiles and executes JavaScript at high speeds and is well suited for real-time, data-intensive apps and APIs. The Modulus Node.js and MongoDB cloud platform is designed to simplify and speed development of the new gen-eration of scalable, always-connected business and consumer apps that are constantly monitored and optimized for the best experience. The Modulus platform is ideally suited for real-time mobile, SaaS, social, and big data apps that run across distributed devices and can seamlessly handle floods of data requests with built-in performance monitoring and analytics. Progress Modulus provides hosted or private PaaS options for developers, enabling them to quickly and easily deploy, scale, and monitor data-intensive, real-time applications using powerful, rapidly growing Node.js and MongoDB technolo-gies. MongoDB is the leading NoSQL database system and is designed for scalability, performance, and high availability. As a result, Node.js is a natural fit for building custom API serv-ices, integrations, messaging frameworks, and independent UI backends. Benefits of developing with Node.js include the following:
✓ It allows you to separate the back-end UI layer from the back-end business logic, giving front-end developers maximum control and flexibility to work in the frame-work of their choice.
✓ It provides a scalable framework for messaging by man-aging real-time, two-way communication with thousands of concurrent connections between any types of clients and services.
✓ It enables developers to build new API services and inte-grations with other Internet-enabled products and APIs. The components and add-ons to the Pacific platform support Node.js development efforts. Rollbase is a natural fit to serve as a powerful Backend as a Service (BaaS) for Node.js applications. DataDirect Cloud (using APIs) can be used as a way to integrate with disparate cloud and on-premise data sources in Node.js applications. Using its APIs, Progress Corticon business rules management can be used as a complex decision service engine from Node.js applications. In effect, Node.js serves as the central glue for tying technologies and applications together in a high-control platform. Figure 2-3 shows you how it all works together.
Figure 2-3: Node.js ties together underlying technologies and applications
Getting an Overview
of Progress Corticon
Progress Corticon enables you to automate your business rules so your organization can make better, faster decisions. It does so by separating business logic from the application code, resulting in improved agility and reduced time-to-market by empowering business users (as well as IT) to directly implement and modify rules outside the application — freeing your IT resources to focus on innovation rather than custom coding for rules.
More than 500 customers use Corticon’s patented no-coding rules engine to automate their most sophisticated decision processes, reducing development and change cycles by up to 90 percent.
Using Rollbase for
Application Development
In This Chapter
▶ Implementing Rollbase
▶ Creating, editing, and deleting an application ▶ Retrieving and accessing data
▶ Transferring data
R
ollbase uses a model-driven development approach for application development. Objects in Rollbase are appli-cation building blocks that capture and store data in chunks, eliminating much of the need for coding. Objects are also customizable so you can add more fields as needed. And you can easily define relationships between objects. For example, a single sales request in a sales support application could require multiple sales resources, so you can choose a “many to one” relationship.This flexible building-block approach combined with an easy-to-use interface accessible by a browser simplifies the application development process.
This chapter explains how you can find your way around Rollbase, essential information about the Quick Create Wizard, how to customize your application to meet your needs, and how to distribute your applications.
Deploying Rollbase: The Basics
The fastest way to get started with Rollbase is to log in through the console and become familiar with the user interface. The Quick Create Wizard (the official name for the Rollbase application creation shortcut) walks you through the steps to build an application foundation.After you have explored the interface, I recommend that you install prebuilt applications from the Application Directory, take a tour of the apps, see how the user interface (UI) works, and go from there.
You can get additional information, including videos, at www. progress.com/rollbase. You can access Rollbase hosted cloud at www.progress.com/rollbase using a computer running one of the following operating systems: Windows, Linux, or MacOS. All you need is an up-to-date web browser with JavaScript and cookies enabled. Progress recommends the following browsers:
✓ Internet Explorer 9.0 + ✓ Firefox 21 +
✓ Google Chrome 27.0 + ✓ Safari 6.0 +
Rollbase protects web-browsing sessions with HTTPS and SSL. With HTTPS, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology protects your information using both server authentication and data encryption, ensuring that your data is safe, secure, and avail-able only to registered users of your account. Depending on the browser, a lock icon displays in the address or the status bar to verify that you’re accessing the Rollbase service via HTTPS.
Setting up your account
The first person to sign up for Rollbase from a particular organization becomes an administrator. During the sign-up process, this user provides information about your organiza-tion that is stored in the account. Administrators can do the following:
✓ Create new users
✓ Install applications from the Application Directory ✓ Customize applications for specific business needs ✓ Create entirely new applications
Any Rollbase user with the administrator role has full access to all of these features, as well as to all data in the account. Administrative users can also purchase additional user licenses, upgrade to another Rollbase subscription plan, add more capacity for records, applications, storage, and more.
Obtaining your Progress ID
A Progress ID registration is required for the first administra-tive user and is free. Visit www.progress.com/rollbase, click Try Now, select either Hosted or Private Cloud, and follow the steps to create the account.
Logging in
Both administrative and other users receive a confirmation email with a temporary password and a login URL. Logging in requires a user ID and password.
Progress recommends that you change your password peri-odically to protect your account. Administrators can require that passwords meet certain criteria, such as length and inclu-sion of numbers.
Using user navigation
Rollbase is the application Platform as a Service (PaaS) within Pacific that enables the building of web-based applica-tions. When you log in, you’ll see that it’s available from the Applications drop-down menu. Using the Progress Rollbase web-based user interface, you can develop and distribute applications and search, navigate, and enter data.
Accessing application settings
You can manage your applications from the Application Setup area. To access the Applications Setup area, follow these steps:
1. In the Applications section of the Rollbase Sidebar, click the down arrow and select Setup from the drop-down list.
Doing so displays the Setup page.
2. On the Setup page, click Applications Setup.
Doing so displays the Applications Setup page.
3. On the Applications Setup page, click Applications.
This step displays the Application Setup ➪ Applications page.
4. Click the name of an application to display the details for that application, such as its objects, tabs, and portals.
Developing an Application
on Rollbase
Rollbase can help you develop your application easier than you may think. These sections describe the key steps to create an application in Rollbase.
Creating an application
You can create new applications in the following ways:
New Application button
The New Application button below the Applications drop-down list allows you to quickly create applications by a vari-ety of methods:
✓ Use the Quick Create Wizard, where you’re guided through a step-by-step process of creating objects, fields, and relationships.
✓ Install an application template from the App library. ✓ Use external data from sources such as spreadsheets,
Force.com, Microsoft Access, or OpenEdge.
✓ Use existing objects (objects are chunks or pre-existing modules of data).
Setup application
From the Setup application, you can create a new application that uses existing tabs and objects in it. To create a new appli-cation from the Setup appliappli-cation, do the following:
1. From the Applications dropdown list, select Setup. 2. In the Applications Setup area, click Applications.
Doing so displays a list of existing applications.
3. Click New Application.
4. In the Deployment Status section, select or deselect the appropriate boxes.
You can select or deselect the following boxes depend-ing on your preferences:
• This application is deployed: Deployed applica-tions are available to both administrative and non-administrative users. You may want to leave an application undeployed until you’re ready to expose it to your end users.
• This application doesn’t appear in the Sidebar
selector: Specifies whether or not to show this
Application in the “Apps” sidebar component in the Deployment Status section.
• Enable field-level help for this application: Whether or not to display field-level help for any Object Fields in this application that have field-level help defined.
• Show first level of menus below tabs: It pro-vides an option to display the first level of menu items underneath the tabs.
5. In the Application Details section, fill in the follow-ing fields:
• Application Name: This name is in the
Applications drop-down (if enabled) and in the navigation heading.
• Description: This optional description is shown if you publish the application.
• Custom Logo: This is a logo in GIF, JPG, or PNG format to replace the Rollbase logo in the top-left corner. Use an image that is 212 pixels wide by 53 pixels high.
6. Add any existing components to your new application.
The Tabs, Core Objects, and Dependent Objects sec-tions give you the opportunity to add existing com-ponents to this new application. You can specify the order in which tabs appear.
• To add a component, select it from the Available list and click the right arrow to move it to the Selected list.
• To reorder tabs, click the up or down arrow to the right of the list.
7. In the User Roles and Individual Users section, specify the permissions for this application.
8. Click Save.
Editing an application
You can modify applications from the Setup application in two ways:
✓ View all application components and edit them by category.
✓ Edit the same attributes and properties set when the application was created.
The following procedures describe both:
2. In the Applications Setup area, click Applications.
A list of existing applications displays:
3. Find the application of interest and do one of the following:
• Click the application name to view all application components.
• Click Edit to change attributes or properties set when you created the application.
Deleting an application
Deleting an application has the following consequences: ✓ All objects (and corresponding data records) that are
assigned to the deleted application and aren’t assigned to any other application will be permanently deleted. ✓ All menus, portals, and hosted files that are assigned to
this application and aren’t assigned to any other applica-tion will be permanently deleted.
✓ The application record will be permanently deleted. You can’t delete System objects while deleting an application because doing so will cause an error. To avoid accidental dele-tion of important informadele-tion:
✓ Before deleting an application, you must edit it and deselect the Is Deployed box.
✓ Wait for one hour and then delete your application.
Considering other app options
The More Actions button on the application view page (Navigate to Setup ➪ Applications, and click the Application Name) offers additional options to manage your application. The following sections examine these options in greater detail:
View Diagram
The View Diagram option provides a convenient way to visu-alize your application’s objects and the relationships among them. This option becomes particularly useful when you’re
designing sophisticated applications involving many objects and relationships.
This option can also be useful to look at as a reference tool during the application development process and as a tool to understand how an installed application was built. Clicking on this button opens a pop-up window that contains a dynami-cally generated graphic representing the application. This graphic is generated by a free service called yuml.me (www.yuml.me) and may take a few moments to load. For example, Recruitday Application is available in the Rollbase Application directory to help get you started.
Application Tree
This option allows you to view all the application’s compo-nents in UI tree in a pop-up window.
Generate XML
This option allows you to generate and save an XML repre-sentation of your entire application. With this XML, you can install the application into another Rollbase Customer using the “Install from XML” option on the Setup ➪ Applications Setup ➪ Applications page. It allows you to bypass the shared Application Directory portal.
To generate the XML for an application, you need to do the following:
✓ Export the version of application as XML. This value is auto-incremented each time you generate new XML. ✓ Use the Lock Status radio buttons to choose whether
Users in destination tenants can:
• Modify all parts of the installed application (unlocked)
• Modify only unlocked objects, menus, and portals (partially locked)
• Modify nothing; the tenant can’t customize the entire application (locked)
If your application has some inconsistencies or errors, you won’t be able generate its XML.
The application XML for complex applications can be as large as much as 5MB or more. To save the application XML as a local file, choose Save or Save As when you’ve opened the XML for viewing.
Update from XML
Use this option to upload a Rollbase Application XML file and install updates.
Performance Audit
Use the Performance Audit screen to:
✓ Validate all formulas used by your objects and display errors (if any).
✓ Check and see if your formulas are using loops (a loop is a sequence of instructions that is continually repeated until a certain condition is reached) through related records. If so, replace them using Query API whenever possible.
✓ Check whether your Views are using the Template and Formula fields (which can decrease performance).
Custom Sidebar
You can add a custom sidebar component to your application. This component will appear under the Application section on your sidebar. To add the Custom Sidebar component, open the Application View page and select Custom Sidebar from the More Options drop-down list. Then specify the component’s title and body (HTML or JavaScript).
You can use system-wide settings or other template helpers. You can also copy the web link to a widget such as Google Gadget or from other providers, such as Yahoo!.
Associating Custom Sidebar with your application ensures that this component will be published and installed with your application.
Custom Header and Footer
You can specify HTML to be added at the beginning and at the end of each page of the application. You can also include tem-plate tokens not related to particular object (often referred to as helpers).
Application Header and Footer offers a convenient way to add JavaScript to every page. Consider using Hosted Files to sim-plify this process further.
Mobile-Web Enabled
Use this option to enable a Mobile-Web application for mobile devices, such as iPhones and Androids. After it’s enabled, select all the menus you want to make available on mobile devices. Progress Rollbase provides two mobile app options:
✓ Mobile Web ✓ Rollbase Mobile
Translation
You can generate Excel spreadsheets and translate your entire application into a foreign language with this option.
Attach String Tokens
You can attach selected String Tokens. In Java, it’s common to have to separate a string into separate tokens. These tokens can be words, numbers, commands, or whatever. Attached String Tokens will be published and installed as part of application.
View Installation Log
This option allows you to see the log created when applica-tions are installed.
Installing updates
To update applications you have installed from the
Application directory, as well as any default applications that came with your Progress Rollbase account, use the Check for Updates button on the Application Page.
Click this button to check for any updates to the tion. When you do, you’ll be taken to the Rollbase applica-tion directory page for that applicaapplica-tion, where you can see a button called Install Updates if a newer version is available.
Below this button you can see a check box called Overwrite Changes. By default, this check box isn’t checked, because Rollbase assumes that you may have made changes to pages, views, triggers, and so forth in that application. If so, you probably don’t want to overwrite those changes. If you want to receive all the changes to pages and other application com-ponents, you can select Overwrite Changes.
Select it if you want to overwrite existing application compo-nents with the latest updates. If you don’t select it, you’ll only receive new application components included in this update. You won’t receive any updated components. For example, leaving this box deselected means you won’t receive any changes the publisher made to existing fields, pages, views, templates, portals, or portal pages; you only receive new com-ponents the publisher created.
If you’re an application publisher and Rollbase ISV partner, you have the capability to push new versions of applications to all your customers at once from your ISV account.
Managing permissions
You can manage permissions to all aspects of an applica-tion by role and by user. User-level applicaapplica-tion permissions override role-based permissions, allowing you to provide additional access control on a user-specific basis. In addition, Rollbase provides relationship-based permissions as well as role-based Field-level permissions. For a complete overview of managing Applications, click Permissions and Access Control.
Accessing Data with Rollbase
Data integration is an important part of the management of information in your environment. Utilizing the accurate, effec-tive tools for this data access is essential for applications to work correctly and provide accurate information for the desired result.
The Pacific platform provides integration for multiple data sources as well as the capability to connect to data via APIs. These sections highlight the different ways you can use the Pacific platform to access data.
Integrating with SOAP or REST
When building integrations or external data manipulation tools that need to communicate with Rollbase, you can use the Rollbase SOAP or REST APIs.
The SOAP and REST APIs expose the same functionality and use the same method names. A metadata API for both SOAP and REST provides methods for creating and manipulating definitions of applications, objects, fields, and relationships. The account under which metadata methods are invoked must have administrative privileges.
Using the SOAP API
Rollbase uses Literal WSDL encoding. If your SOAP infrastruc-ture doesn’t support Literal WSDL encoding, consider using the REST API. To make SOAP calls, you must have a valid Rollbase user account with login credentials. API users must have permission to view, create, update, or delete records to perform these actions via API calls. Permissions can’t be set via the API. Only the administrator can set them using the Rollbase user interface in the setup area.
The Rollbase SOAP API uses the same workflow mechanism as the standard Rollbase user interface. For instance, triggers designed to run on object record creation will run if a record is created through SOAP API. The Rollbase SOAP API uses the same permissions mechanism as the standard Rollbase user interface. Changes in triggers, views, and so forth might not immediately be updated on the web services server because of latency due to caching.
To establish a SOAP API session, call the login() method, which takes username and password credentials. The login() call returns a session ID that must be used as the first parameter in all subsequent API calls. To end a SOAP API session, use the login() method.
To protect Rollbase resources from overuse, the number of API calls is limited. The number of calls, also referred to as
hits, is posted incrementally over a 24-hour period for each
Rollbase customer and then resets the next day. The type of your subscription determines the actual number of API hits allowed. You can find this information in the Subscription
Details page. You should contact Progress Rollbase Support if you need to increase this limit for any reason.
Authenticating with REST API
REST calls require authentication and are subject to the same security procedures as normal user logins, including IP address whitelists (a list or register of those that are being provided a particular privilege, service, mobility, access, or recognition) and external authentication rules. Using this API requires a valid Rollbase user account with login cre-dentials. The account must have permission to view, create, update, or delete records to perform these actions using REST calls.
Permissions can’t be set via the API. Only the administrator logged into a Rollbase account can set them.
Supplying user credentials
You can provide user credentials in one of the following ways: ✓ By using a session ID: Call the login AP with valid
cre-dentials to receive a session ID. Supply that session ID in every REST call as an HTTP header or URL parameter. At the end of session call, log out to end the REST ses-sion. For example, this PHP code sets the HTTP header: header('sessionId: '.$sessionId); this example passes the session ID in the URL:&sessionId=1776eb2 d56384f2d9d62f1bf83821b6d@5857.
✓ By providing basic HTTP authentication through the
HTTP header. Append @ and the customer ID to the login
name. A PHP code example: $header = base64_enc ode($userName.'@'.$custId.':'.$password); header('Authorization: Basic '.$header); Private cloud master server users with login permissions can use their credentials to call the REST API on a speci-fied customer. REST API calls using a session ID or basic authentication are considered to be made on behalf of the logged-in user. Permissions of that user are checked for each subsequent call. For instance, to update a record logged-in user must have edit permissions on that record, or the API call will fail. Use of a session ID is pre-ferred in terms of performance and security.
Changes in triggers, views, and the like might not imme-diately affect the REST server because of latency due to the caching mechanism.
Migrating Apps to Rollbase
Rollbase supports migration of the majority of today’s industry-leading application platforms, including Microsoft Access, Salesforce.com, Force.com, and more. Many existing Salesforce and Force.com customers are looking for more flexible alternatives to the Salesforce.com platform and need to migrate all or a subset of their existing applications to Rollbase.If you’re a Salesforce or Force.com customer, you’ll be pleased to know that Rollbase is the only cloud platform that allows you to move your Salesforce.com CRM and other Force.com applications off the Force.com platform in a just a few clicks. These sections walk you through the easy migration process from a Salesforce.com CRM to the Rollbase platform.
The Wizard makes application
migration easy
Importing your Salesforce.com CRM application and all of your data to your own custom Rollbase CRM application is easy because it’s completely wizard driven. In just a few simple steps, Rollbase creates a CRM application with all your Salesforce.com objects, including custom fields, relationships, page layouts, and data.
The process is identical for any Force.com application and your data. Simply stick to the following steps, and Rollbase creates a custom application with all your Force.com applica-tion’s objects, including custom fields, relationships, page layouts, and data.
Rollbase can’t convert APEX and SQL code for you. Some for-mula fields and components with custom code may not work in Rollbase without modification.
Migrating your app to Rollbase
in five easy steps
In order to migrate your application to Rollbase, just follow these helpful steps that walk you through the process:
1. Register a ProgressID in order to be able to access the Progress Pacific and Rollbase environment.
Simply go to www.rollbase.com and sign up for a free evaluation by clicking Try Now. Doing so takes you to a page asking you for basic information, includ-ing a username and password. Within a few seconds, you should receive a welcome email allowing you to access and log in to the Pacific console and begin developing applications with Rollbase.
2. Build a new application based on your Force.com application.
To do so,
• Click on the Create Application button, which will fire up the Create Application Wizard. You want to import external metadata from an existing applica-tion so select this radio button.
• Click Create. You want to import from an existing Force.com application so select this radio button.
3. Import your Force.com application.
Doing so takes three steps:
• Log in to your Salesforce account and select the application that you want to import. For this sce-nario, select the Sales or CRM application.
During migration, Rollbase preserves relationships between objects and data. As part of the process, Rollbase will import not only the objects and their respective fields that make up the application, but also the relationships between the objects and the data itself. For example, if you look at the data avail-able for a contact named Jane Smith, you may see she is associated with an account named University of USA. The import process will ensure this relation-ship is preserved when migrating the metadata into Rollbase.
• Retrieve a security token to include with your cre-dentials. You can do so by going to My Settings ➪ Personal ➪ Reset My Security Token in Salesforce. For this step, you need your Salesforce API creden-tials together with a security token. The token will subsequently be emailed to you. After you get it, copy the security token and click Next.
The wizard allows you to import not only standard, but also any custom objects that have been created for the application. Select the objects you need and click Next.
• Review the structure of the imported metadata. If you take a look, you can see that Rollbase will import and create a new application called Sales. The Sales application will have a series of tabs that correspond to the objects that were selected in the preceding step.
If you expand out the Campaign Object, you can see the fields associated with the object. You can get rid of any of these if you don’t need them in your new Rollbase application.
4. When you’re satisfied with the structure of the meta-data, simply click Create to get Rollbase to build a brand new sales application.
Within a few seconds, Rollbase will create the new application. And now it displays on your list. After the data records have been successfully imported, you’ll receive an email confirmation.
5. Review the imported application.
Take a look at the imported application. Here you can see all the tabs associated with the objects marked for import. If you click the Contacts tab, you can view the data. The layout looks exactly like it displayed in the Salesforce application.
The import process not only retains the page layout, but also retains the relationships for each record, which you can see if you click on the account details. The data and layout look good, and from here you can also see other relationships that were part of the original Salesforce application (such as current and prospective opportunities and so forth).
