SystemBuilder Extensible Architecture (SB/XA)

Details

SystemBuilder Extensible Architecture (SB/XA) delivers new presentation clients with advanced styling capabilities, enhanced grid support, XPS support for reports, connection resilience, Single-Sign On, grid and file transfer performance improvements. The inclusion of example code demonstrating how to take advantage of these new features provides a leg-up to developers wanting to make the most of this new release.

Presentation Clients

SB/XA provides 2 new presentation clients allowing existing SB+ applications to be deployed through a browser or a rich client with a single click using click-once technology. These clients provide new vector based graphics allowing animation, scalability and resizing without any loss of screen resolution and do not require any changes to existing developed applications.

Advanced Styling

In the past, changes to an application’s visual aspects have required a change to the application server. To address this, SB/XA’s User Interface (UI) controls - written using XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) - are separated from the Application Server. Styling can be defined as a theme to brand your application, or can be dynamically associated with application-specific data or events to provide visual cues to improve usability.

Enhanced Grid Support

Until now, data was presented in spreadsheet format only. With this release, new grid capabilities allow controlling/dependant data to be presented visually as multiple data columns in a grid, as a cardview, as a carousel, or in a customized view through styling.

XPS Support for Reports

ReportWriter and Query Reports are automatically presented in the new presentation clients with an XPS control that allows reports to be viewed on screen, printed or saved as XPS for subsequent reuse or authoring providing true document portability for reports.

Connection Resilience / Transport Security

SB/XA offers a secure and resilient connection between the new presentation clients and the SB/XA Application Server using a new middle-tier Communication Server. Increasing mobility of clients connecting over the Internet can increase the number of dropped connections and expose confidential information to hackers. Connection resilience gives the new clients the ability to reconnect to SB/XA and recover customer access to applications and data without administrator intervention. Automatic transport security insures every connection from the new clients to the middle tier is encrypted to the highest standard of Internet security.

Single-Sign On (SSO)

SB/XA takes advantage of a new middle-tier to automate security connections and remove the need for multiple User Ids and passwords after initial configuration of a users system. This simplifies the need for additional password administration, and users avoid the frustration of having to remember different ids and passwords.

Performance

SB/XA improves file transfer performance significantly and offers capabilities to download all file types including binary images. Grid performance has been increased by several orders of magnitude and the addition of a new grid control offers unparalleled future opportunity to display and manipulate nested relational data in grids.

Example Code

SB/XA provides a suite of example code that demonstrates how to utilize XAML to manipulate the User Interface in the new presentation clients.