Delivering Innovation - Aviarc - Bringing urgency to the delivery of business innovation

Delivering Innovation

With the uncontrolled proliferation of business-user driven 'personal' applications a strategy is required for IT to regain control of the total IT resource in an enterprise.

The advent of the Internet bought untold opportunities for businesses to expand their presence and their offerings. Unfortunately it also brought new development challenges to deal with.

For medium and large enterprises that initially used Java, the cost and complexity of building business applications for the web has deterred them from implementing anything other than key, easily justified applications that provide a rapid return. Frameworks that automated some of the complexities have helped, but a Java application developer still needs a very advanced knowledge of the plumbing of the internet to be able to produce satisfactory results.

Some portions of applications that require manual coding include:

• State and transaction management
• Transaction and system recovery
• The rich user experience.

Alternatively vendors delivering high productivity development tools for large organisations have made great progress, with the major unresolved issue being scalability.

 With the challenge being: "How can I deliver a robust web application to the user for the cost of developing in Microsoft Access?", we came up with the following solution containing both a development and deployment server platform, and enabling methodologies:

This diagram shows the range of offerings available in the Aviarc methodology and software platform.

The technical challenges to be met for the delivery of Enterprise Small Systems are:

1. Delivering a rich browser based experience that rivals what is offered by traditional fat client applications.
   • Designing User Interface excellence – including complex feature rich widgets.
   • Achieving through technical excellence the strengths the web offers over traditional clients.
2. Using the web and only the web.
   • Having no need for anything other than a standard browser to build or run ESS applications.
3. Making the web work how people work.
   • Not forcing people to deal with any inadequacies of the web e.g. back buttons that don’t generally behave as a user would expect.
   • Removing plumbing issues for the developer.
   • Separating application logic (presentation and business logic) from environmental coding etc.
   • Believing that the user experience should drive all design decisions.
4. Getting all the small things right
   • Often it is the small things that ruin the web experience. For example poor navigation features may ruin a good application.
5. Being server and browser independent.
   • Allowing customers to use their browser, operating system and database of choice.
6. Delivering productivity and enterprise scalability.
   • Focusing on ESS application performance and scalability.
   • Seamlessly integrating enterprise applications (e.g. support different architectures, security models, single sign on, themes and portal mode etc).
   • Supporting enterprise testing, distribution, development lifecycle etc.
   • Insulating the developer from enterprise features such as clustering, n-tier, persistence etc.
7. Being open and extensible in design.
   • Supporting appropriate standards (Java, XML etc).
   • Allowing easy extensions by capable end users.
   • Integrating with Java and .Net type technologies.
8. Enabling a new level of manageability for IT departments.
   • Supporting the full product lifecycle in deployed application are management.
   • 24x7 centralised management of all ESS applications.

Benefits of the Aviarc approach

Key users now have a process and a set of tools to deliver their urgent IT needs, from the initial idea through the solution life-cycle.

IT is not distracted from delivering to their strategic plan and in fact the Agility Centre approach, with Aviarc Australia outsourced development, will add to your productive resource base, not drain it.

Production Visualisation Methodology allows developers to build and design the application 'look-and-feel' with the users of the system, before the detailed logic is coded. This speeds up the initial requirements and design processes while facilitating user buy-in to the design. Once designed and accepted, no further coding is required for the user interface (unlike conventional prototyping techniques), and the developers can move directly to the business logic of the application. 

Once deployed, all Enterprise Small Systems are managed centrally; standard enterprise IT architectures and databases are employed; no islands of data are created.

An Enterprise Small System recognised to have greater Corporate applicability can be extended, rather than re-developed, a major saving in both time to market and cost.

The rich-client architecture ensures zero-cost client-side upgrades and enhancements, while delivering the functionality usually seen in fat-client applications.

The Aviarc Agility Centre methodology ensures that the risk involved is matched to the cost of proceeding. All prices are quoted prior to development commencing and are fixed.