Be a composer

A short cut for developers – and others

It's not programming any more - it's composition. At least this is what Andy Bailey, VP of global marketing at Attunity, argues. With the release this week of version 2.1 of InFocus, Bailey says Attunity has introduced 'the first iteration of developer tools' which will enable customers to build their own applications on the InFocus platform.

"InFocus is a relatively new product - we only put out the first major release in September 2006 and there were no graphical tools with it then. But version 2.1 gives developers graphical tools to compose workplace applications using standard components such as XML and JSP," Bailey explains.

Attunity, based in Boston, MA, made its name in the data connection market producing change data capture (CDC) adapters for major IT players from IBM and HP to Microsoft and Oracle. It only recently moved into the emerging market for service-based workplace applications with InFocus, building on its knowledge of data connectivity. Workplace applications aim to improve collaboration by bringing data sources and services together in real time.

Version 2.1 of InFocus features two specific tools - Workplace Designer, which is aimed at business analysts for building front-end clients - and Composition Designer - which is used by technical development staff to build server-based services.

"Workplace Designer gives the analyst a quick way to build a front end. It can, for example, define frames and items such as RSS feeds with the help of the end user. While Composition Designer uses the Ajax model and standard technologies to compose the back-end services," says Bailey. Attunity calls this Cojax from 'Composition Of JSP and XML'.

He goes on to say that Cojax can cut application development time to days rather than months. "Rapid development is the core of what we are doing with InFocus and we see application composition as the way to do this. It is the direction all software development is moving." ®