Efficient Technologies

Browsers have now become an integral part of the desktop PC. In addition to enabling internet access it is often used as the interface to intranet based applications ie. accountancy software, employee data etc. Applications designed this way are termed "thin client" and offer many advantages over "thick clients" which normally have a proprietary-based user interface. For thick clients, when the application is upgraded this normally means an upgrade to the userinterface so all desktops that access this application also need to upgrade to the new software, which increases support and maintenance time. In the case of thin clients the application is upgraded at the server and there are no changes required on the desktop interface since it's using a browser to access the application.

Microsoft has provided a suite of back-end development platforms that make the design and development of web-based applications significantly easier. This evolution has been spurred by the growth of the internet as well as the demand for e-commerce applications. Figure 1 shows the most common web-based architecture using http, which can provide most of the demanding requirements of a dynamic-based application. Semibase has extended the methodology of this architecture to build scalable business solutions that can grow with the company's needs. Here is more information (patent application) about our new architecture.

Figure 1. "Thin-client" internet architecture using PC (browser)
and servers (Web server, database)

Typically business applications always make use of data, and some kind of business logic on this data. The business transaction may also make use of other sets of data which may not necessarily be held locally in the same server. Microsoft ASP (Active Server Pages) has become increasingly popular due to its power and flexibility in building web pages with connections to databases. The architecture in Figure 1 can be extended further to include business applications, which, instead of operating and residing in their own entity, are now intimately linked to the database. An application now sends information regarding its status to the database. This can be information about its communication with another application or client. Applications make use of the database as the central repository of information and therefore communication between applications takes place through the database holding application information. This offers several benefits to the overall system:

1. The overall status of the system is well known, since the database retains information on the application's state and problems within the system can be intercepted quickly.
2. New applications can be integrated easily to the business. For example, new applications requiring some link to other applications do so through the database information, therefore assisting in the rapid development of applications without the need to integrate through object-based programming.
3. New business applications have much tighter coupling to the overall business model because they have extended access to other business-related information through the database.

Figure 2 shows the business applications tied to the database, allowing greater control of the overall business architecture and paving the way for rapid applications development. The tight integration of the applications means reduced maintenance of the overall sytem and a greater efficiency of the business.

The use of stored procedures greatly facilitates the design of the above architecture, since the application logic is tightly integrated to the database. Figure 3 shows the simplicity of this method for creating web-based applications using this method, and is explained in context of an email example which was built using these methods. The ASP page calls an email component ("CDONTS") which collects the emails from the mail root directory and places these in the database. Clients now retrieve their emails, which are now centralized in the database. If customer information is held within the same database, then the email can be checked with the customer table for a match, which pulls the information of the customer along with their email. This is very easily done using SQL in stored procedures compared to writing object-based code, which requires a longer development time and inreased maintenance cost. This simple example shows the power and flexibility of building scalable business applications which are now seamlessly integrated.

Probesmart.com, created by Semibase, exploits this technology, which significantly reduces the overhead, support and maintenance while providing increased flexibility for growth.

For more information on this or any other questions, please contact us and we will be glad to assist you.