The amalgamation of workflow processes and e-commerce introduces a powerful paradigm for modeling and managing virtual organizations and cross-company process chains. UNIFACE Eight introduces the components to implement this paradigm.

Organizational Model Editor

The Organizational Editor is used to build the model that describes the organization structure. The organization structure describes functions that have responsibility and authority. A person within the organization has a role that represents this responsibility and authority. An organization is built with teams and departments consisting of people working in defined roles.

Process Model Editor

The process model identifies the individual tasks or activities that comprise a process, including the rules determining the correct flow from one task to another. A business process is a set of interrelated procedures or activities that achieve a business objective or goal. The goal to be accomplished depends entirely on the business and the way it is structured. For example, if a business has a sales function, a process objective might be to complete a sales order.

Business Model Editor

The Business Model Editor is a graphical editing tool used to define the flow of work.

Workflow Engine

The Workflow Engine manages the business model by determining which tasks have to be executed by which actors.

Business Manager Workbench

The Business Manager Workbench allows users to manage their processes at deployment time. Processes can be monitored and tuned without the need to involve application engineers.

Task Desktop

The Task Desktop is the most frequently used business process automation (BPA) component. All actors involved in a business process have a work list on their desktop. The list is made up of active tasks.

Business messages send and receive

UNIFACE Eight supports inter-process communication through the use of B2B messages. B2B messages can be formatted as BizTalk messages. In addition, UNIFACE Eight supports SOAP messages. Documentation that explains how to implement support for other B2B protocols is provided. Secure communication is implemented with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

UNIFACE 8.1.01 is designed for rapid Internet application development, where (existing) business data needs to be exposed to the Internet. Ideally, Internet applications should be developed with a three-tier architecture. Three-tier applications deliver the following benefits:

• re-usability of business logic (including re-use by non-UNIFACE components)
• re-usability of referential integrity constraint management across (heterogeneous) DBMSs

• allow non-UNIFACE components to access business logic as implemented in UNIFACE

Business tier: Entity Services, Session Services

For the business tier, UNIFACE Eight introduces stateless Session Services and stateful Entity Services. Entity Services are used for executing business object behavior and manage referential integrity. Session Services contain business logic specifically for hierarchical record sets. Typically, cross-entity validations belong to the Session Service.

Data access tier

A three-tier application defines behavior over several component types. Entity types are specific to the component subtypes at which they are targeted. UNIFACE Eight defines three component subtypes:

• ESV (Entity Service) entity
• SSV (Session Service) entity
• USP (Server Page) entity

Presentation tier: UNIFACE Server Pages, UNIFACE Forms

In a three-tier architecture, a UNIFACE Server Page delegates all business logic processing to the Session Service. It does this by interchanging hierarchical XML record sets with Session Services.

UNIFACE Router

UNIFACE Router is a major new deliverable in the UNIFACE server architecture. The multi-threaded UNIFACE Router routes the server requests from different clients to the same server. This resource sharing drastically increases resource usage efficiency and allows load balancing. Servers that can be shared are database servers, application servers, UNIFACE Name Server and the UNIFACE Message daemon.

Enhanced preferences

UNIFACE Eight increases developer efficiency with adaptable properties and defaults for models and components.

Enhanced Component Editor

The Component Editor has been enhanced and provides the following capabilities:

• one editor for all component types and templates
• integral editing of paint and triggers
• syntax highlighting, keyword completion, undo/ redo, find/ replace, drag and drop
• create DTD from structure
• load structure from DTD

Integration Workbench

The Assembly Workbench (UNIFACE Seven) has been renamed to Integration Workbench.

Extended triggers

Drag and drop enhancements

A visual object can be selected and dropped on or in another visual object. This process triggers a default drop action (usually Move Here or Copy Here). Dropping with the right mouse button allows the user to select a non-default drop action from a pop-up menu, e.g. ‘Create Shortcut Here’ or ‘Cancel’. When the object is dragged into an area in which it can be dropped, the developer will receive a message to this effect.