OFOQ FABS 2.0 White-paper

White Paper

Copyright 2011 United OFOQ. All rights reserved. 2011 Page 1

United OFOQ FABS

Framework for Agile Business Solutions

The Issue: Mismatching Customers Expectations

How many Times you faced a client telling you this is not

what we have agreed on and this doesnt match my

expectation?

This situation takes place a lot right after the delivery of a

software system or its updates.

Customer gives you a new requirements list revoking a lot

of the original list, most of them are related to Graphical

User Interface.

Did you face a last-minute change returning the project to

square zero; your client believes he is different than others

and insists on changes inherently in the Graphical User

Interface.

Did you ever define developing standards and your

developers didnt follow it, or your expert developer leaves

you without transferring his code know-how to others, or

thought about open source but retreated due to lack of

resources.

In United OFOQ we face all of the above every day and

we believe many of the development environments are

facing the same which, drives us to find a solution that

eliminates all of the above problems and at the same time

increases the productivity of our resources

The Solution: United OFOQ FABS

It is a Framework that is:

Used To Create and customize end-to-end agile business

software (easy and fast time-to-market)

Used By Business Analyst, Applications implementers, and

end-users with minimal/none programming work required

Based On Open Source for Java (J2EE), Portal User

Interface, SOA, and BPM-BPEL

FABS is the solution, where most updates need neither to rebuild nor to redeploy applications

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Build an application in one tenth of classical development time No coding skills required to build 90% of your application

Portal allows the gathering of FABS & Non- FABS applications in the user home page

FABS Advantages

Complete Application Builder

FABS allows you to flexibly build complete applications in

tenth of the time needed to build them using traditional

tools.

At the same time, FABS maintains the same flexibility

during applications update, unlike CASE tools where

maintenance is a great time waste to the extent it ruins all

the time saved during first build.

The concept behind the FABS is to build your applications

in multiple components that are loosely coupled then, let

the user customize his own preferences.

Meet Business Needs

Applications are built to satisfy certain business needs

however, they normally need intermediates to

understands their needs and transfer them into a technical

application.

Unfortunately, a huge gap always comes out between the

actual business needs and the generated application,

and usually it takes a long time before the two sides

understand each other but, this understanding doesnt

come at no cost rather a huge cost and time loss.

By Using FABS, business owners are the ones who create

more than 90% of their own application and eliminating

the needed intermediates for it.

Portal Based

FABS uses Portal as its standard application user interface.

Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a

consistent look and feel with access control and

procedures for multiple applications and databases.

Portal provides user with tools to personalize his desktop in

a way to facilitate his daily work and maintain valuable

information near to his fingertip.

In addition to FABS components, user can include

addition other applications like Facebook, Twitter, GMail,

Yahoo, RSS, News, etc in his home page.

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FABS makes building standard BPM application as easy as drawing it

.

Business Process Management

For an application to be used efficiently, It becomes a

necessity to reflect the business processes in the

organization.

FABS is designed to integrate smoothly with any BPEL-

Standard based process engine without any changes in

the application, i.e. the same application can be used in

the process driven mode or on the menu driven mode.

The Business processes are separated from the framework

code, which allows process change without the need to

change the framework.

.

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FABS encapsulates multiple technologies into a single development Environment

FABSs Portal Based user interface allows for great user experience

Interoperability

Today application do not live alone, they have to

communicate with the surrounding world smoothly and

easily thus, an external WebServices can be defined and

called from within FABS.

FABS provides different means for interoperability,

including Menu Direct Functions Calls and Business Object

Action

Also, selected FABS functionalities are exposed as

WebService enabling other systems to call them.

FABS Modules can be built on an existing customer

database structure, wrapping every table in a FABS

Entity, availing the full FABS functionalities for this table

and handling it through a Business Object.

Portal provides Inter-Portlet Communication which enables

the portlets, opened in the same page, to communicate

together, pass data between them and hence to be

updated (refreshed) based on this new data passed.

FABS Screens are portlet-based which enables

bidirectional communication with other systems portlets.

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By SaaS, we host the application and your user only needs web browser to access it

Using platform based on Free Open Source Software (FOSS) upturn your solution ROI

FABS allows your customer to personalize his application by himself

SaaS ready

As cloud computing and SaaS (Software As A Service) is

getting every day ground on the IT industry, it is very

important to have your application ready to work as SaaS

in a cloud environment.

FAB makes your generated application ready for SaaS

and multi-tenancy from day one; moreover, without any

development efforts required.

Minimum TCO and low investment

FABS is built using Open source technology with the

ability to deploy using the community edition which

provides effective total cost of the ownership solution; yet,

FABS can work on most of the commercial technology

provided they are Java compliant.

FABS Features

Variant User Interface Utilities

FABS provides multiple User Interface Utilities that meets

most of the client requirements, including:

Tabular Screen

Form Screen

Tree Screen

Screens Wizard

Screens Page

Multiple Selection Screen

Application Builders

As user experience with a system constitutes a major role

in the success of such application and user acceptance,

FABS provides multiple tools (builders) in order to

achieves the ultimate user experience

Entity, Entity Actions, and Validations Builder

Screen builder

Page builder

Report builder

Wizard builder

Menu builder

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General-purpose business components are provided by FABS

Built applications within FABS natively support multi-language user interface

Components Setup

FABS provides multiple tools for System Setup allows a

great flexibility for both application business and user

interface, including:

Alert

Data Dictionary

User Defined Codes

Global System Setup

Filters

Server Job

Application Builders Features

No source-code needed nor generated by the

builders, accordingly, no need to stop the application

or to redeploy it.

User Personalization of system themes and layout

Natively supported mode for self-service when user needs to maintain his personal data or transactions

Multilingual support

Documents

OFOQ FABS 2.0 White-paper