Business Process Management and Workflow are, by their very nature, social activities. The collaboration and communication patterns that are now increasingly referred to as “social computing” were also fundamental to the BPM and workflow models of the early 1990s.
Yet it has been the recent explosi...
When carefully selected and used, Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) may simplify complex code, promote effective communication with customers, improve productivity, and unclog development bottlenecks. In Domain-Specific Languages , noted software development expert Martin Fowler first provides the in...
BPMN 2.0 is the industry standard diagramming language for business process models. The meaning of the business process diagram is the same, regardless of the tool used to create it. But creating models that are correct, complete, and clear demands more than a dictionary of BPMN shapes and symbols. ...
The most prominent Web applications in use today are data-intensive. Scores of database management systems across the Internet access and maintain large amounts of structured data for e-commerce, on-line trading, banking, digital libraries, and other high-volume sites.
Developing and maintaining ...
Authored by members of WfMC, OMG and other key participants in the development of BPMN 2.0, the BPMN 2.0 Handbook Second Edition assembles industry thought-leaders and international experts. Following the ground-breaking body of work in the BPMN 2.0 Handbook First Edition this book is greatly expand...
With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast acce...
"Interaction Flow Modeling Language" describes how to apply model-driven techniques to the problem of designing the front end of software applications, i.e., the user interaction. The book introduces the reader to the novel OMG standard Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML). Authors Marco Brambi...
This specification defines the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML). The objective of IFML is to provide system architects, software engineers, and software developers with tools for the definition of Interaction Flow Models that describe the principal dimensions of an application front-end: th...
The goal of this portal is to explore and discuss when, where and how software modeling and model-driven engineering (and when NOT) can improve current software development practices.
Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) is the latest approach to software development, promising to greatly increase the speed and ease of software creation. Early adopters of DSM have been enjoying productivity increases of 500–1000% in production for over a decade. This book introduces DSM and offers exam...
Modeling a business process may require some kind of communication with other related business processes. The reason for this may be to wake up a process that was waiting for a particular situation to verify or to start a new process. The BPMN notation provides two different concepts for this purpos...
"This book discusses how model-based approaches can improve the daily practice of software professionals. This is known as Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) or, simply, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). MDSE practices have proved to increase efficiency and effectiveness in software development,...
Validation is used to check that the data inserted by the user via the application’s user interface complies with the requirements of the application domain.
Validating the data, for example data that is inserted into a form (or in any other View Component or View Component Part with input capabili...
In many applications, such as corporate intranets or CRM, the user may need to access the archive of all registered people, and that archive may be very large. One way to support this requirement is by offering a search form, which however assumes that the user knows at least some information abou...
Using an Enterprise Project aims to divide a project of great size in sub-projects to give an opportunity to organize work in a team with different access modes, managed by the repository. Also you can reduce the amount of memory occupied by the tool during editing. The Enterprise project allows a m...
WebRatio introduced the chance to use Visibility Conditions in a Web Project. This feature allows you to disable or show elements in the generated Web application if the conditions specified for those elements are verified.
It is now possible to integrate the horizontal profiling of the Web appli...
Web applications are usually structured according to the MVC Pattern. The MVC Pattern logically splits the application in three tiers: Model, View and Controller.
WebRatio brings the MVC pattern to its full power, both as design and architectural pattern, by splitting the application in three diffe...
In a Web Application, we often need to grant different groups of users access to different resources. For example, in a Web Application used for Enterprise Resource Planning, the head of Human Resources will have access to all the employees’ sensitive data (such as person details, salary, etc.), whi...
"A rich text editor is an interface for editing rich text within web browsers, which presents the user a ‘what you see is what you get‘ editing area." (Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_rich-text_editor)
A rich text editor can be useful when you want the user to be able to write...
It is possible to integrate manually written JSP pages inside WebRatio applications.
The procedure is short and composed of four phases.
This guide shows the steps required to integrate a JSP in a WebRatio application.
WebRatio Mobile Platform lets you build Android and iOS apps that you can test on your mobile device or submit to the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. It is also possible to debug the mobile application to find and solve any issue that may come out during the development. RemoteDebug iOS WebKit...
The deploy process of a Web application is the final step of the application development. In a structured company, the Web application must pass different tests before going to production.
Usually companies have several different environments where the Web application must be deployed and tested.
...
Most Web applications have protected sections that only registered user can access. Users must remember the credentials provided for each site to which they subscribe.
When users are no longer able to authenticate themselves because they have lost or forgotten their passwords, it is necessary to pr...
WebRatio Reports is an add-on of WebRatio aimed to design and produce professional-quality reports.
WebRatio Reports leverages on Jasper Reports, a popular open source reporting solution, and on its accompanying visual report designer (iReport), to enhance Web applications with professional quali...
The purpose of this article is to provide the basics to operate with styles in WebRatio. A Style Project contains the layout templates needed to generate the graphical elements of your Web Application; the project includes also the resources used in the templates.
A search engine uses a set of well known rules to decide the visibility of a website. One of these rules is to have simple URLs containing the keywords the page should be indexed with. WebRatio 6 introduces a new feature named URL Fragments. This feature allows to increase the search engine ranking ...
This article explains how to model step by step the Vacation Request business process available on the WebRatio add-on. The Vacation Request process focuses in controlling the requests of vacations of the organization, from the initial request up to its approval or rejection.
WebRatio Platform provides a built-in feature for the localization of Web applications.
The localization is based on the usage of keys instead of terms for all the static elements of the Web application (e.g., labels, components and page titles, field labels and so on). WebRatio Platform allows use...
WebRatio support all the databases that are supported by Hibernate. Nevertheless, the list of the database types that you have at disposal when creating a new database connection does not contain the full list, but it proposes the most used. Therefore WebRatio gives you the chance to integrate a new...
WebRatio Mobile Platform allows you to send push notifications from a DataService Project. You need to add and configure a Notification Provider to enable the project for push notifications. The Notification Provider requires a specific configuration for each platform. For the Android platform you n...
In a Web application, feedback messages are used to notify the user about the result of a business logic execution.
Feedback messages vary depending on message types, which can be: success, information, warning, or error.
The Stored Procedure is an Operation that allows calling a procedure stored in a database.
To use this Component correctly, the procedure must be previously created in your database.
Discover how to use the Stored Procedure reading this article.
An important aspect of a Web Application is the visual identity it has.
The Visual Identity represents all the graphic widgets that you may want to use in order to make the Web Application good looking and in order to have a great user experience.
Since it's possible to specify a personalized ...
Content is the most important part of a Web application, and it should be presented in an engaging and professional way to provide the best user experience. Designing, which is the way a specific piece of information must be rendered for the user, is a web designer’s main task when creating a Web ap...
The WebRatio Mobile Platform lets you build Android and iOS apps that you can test on your mobile device or submit to the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. It is also possible to debug the mobile application to find and solve any issues that may arise during development.
This article guides you...
Modeling the domain information managed by the Web Application is a task that can be easily done with WebRatio. In fact, you have at your disposal many options that allow you to easily create the Domain Model starting from an existing database. Nevertheless you may need to manually add some new obje...
Implementing a custom component sometimes means querying the database in the component service class. This article wants to give you an introduction on how to retrieve the hibernate session in the component service and how to use Hibernate efficiently to query the database.
The Excel Style is a predefined style available in WebRatio Platform. This style allows to export the content of a modeled page in an Excel spreadsheet file. The generation process creates a JSP page containing XML code that is processed by a custom tag that invokes the Apache POI engine to render t...
This article explains step by step how to create the business process model of the "Vacation Request" process. You will see a brief explanation about the process proposed and then the procedure to create the process model in WebRatio using the BPM perspective.
The Parameter Collector Operation permits one to collect a set of parameters from multiple sources and to redistribute them to multiple targets. In this way, the operation reduces the model complexity by deleting some data flows, improving its reading and creating a neater model.
In WebRatio it's possible to generate PDF, Excel or RTF reports. This article discusses a particular usage of the WebRatio generated reports. The goal is to create a report in order to use it as attachment for a newsletter (or to store it in the database). Suppose you want to send an email to all th...
The deploy functionality is related to the process of installing your Web Application
on a local/remote machine, or even in the cloud. Deployment is configured in
WebRatio through the Deploy Configurations dialog which allows you to specify all
the deploy settings (e.g. the application to dep...
“Single sign-on (SSO) is a property of access control of multiple related, but independent, software systems. With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them.” (source Wikipedia).
WebRatio allows you to enable the single ...
WebRatio Platform lets you define graphic containers for content shown to the user. These containers can be reused for many projects and applied to different type of content. This is possible thanks to the ability to create a dedicated resource containing the graphic container code. This resource is...
In WebRatio Platform, the state of a component is represented by the Component State Object, a particular data structure that represents the internal state of particular component. This means that each type of component has its particular Component State Object. In its implementation, a Component St...
WebRatio Mobile lets you build Android apps that you can test on your mobile or submit to the Google Play Store. This article guides you through the build process, showing how to create a release build, prepare and submit the Application on the Google Play Store.
The Layout View lets you organize view components in the page using the 960 Grid System. The 960 Grid System (http://960.gs) is very popular CSS framework for defining page layout and is known for its ease and flexibility. The framework is a set of style sheets with CSS rules. It provides two grids:...
The Jump Operation permits to jump forward and backward within the application without modeling an explicit navigation flow. A forward jump redirects the user to the specified Parameter Collector Operation. A backward jump redirects the user to the last visited Jump Operation and follows that operat...
Showing more than one component as a single one is a very common need that may occur while creating the style of a WebRatio Web application.
The first option to achieve this is to use the customization available from the Layout View of the specific page, which offers a wide set of criteria to pla...
It’s a very common practice to display the number of active users of a web application.
WebRatio gives you the possibility to easily get the number of users which are currently navigating your Web application and add this feature to your Web application.
The solution proposed in this article ...