WebDaptive: A User's View

by Jeff Thurston, Consultant

When I first began using WebDaptive over two years ago, I was mainly a client-server programmer with very little professional experience coding for the web. My hobbyist web activities didn't require the precision or hold the responsibility associated with an enterprise level web application. Just beginning work on an intranet based project, I was excited but and a bit nervous about the huge learning curve that lay ahead of me. The software development toolset we were using was great for building applications quickly but aesthetics were never its strong point. Web users tend to want aesthetics, functionality, and speed, all over great distances and on every platform imaginable. How would we deliver a state of the art, rich user experience? How would we handle security? How would the application authenticate users? What about logging? These are all questions our client was posing to the project team.

My fears were quickly put to rest as I saw how easy it was to integrate the code I was writing with the WebDaptive framework. It covered nearly every aspect of the software development project that normally takes a developer's focus away from our reason for being... the business. I didn't have to spend time with complicated controls, XML parsers, writing email objects, or writing to the Windows event log. It was all handled for me in a nice, neat package that was simple to install and configure. Within days I had a functioning tree view and tab layout, and had integrated them with some of our user interfaces that were near completion. I could log messages to either the Windows event log, to file, or both. I was authenticating users against our client's Active Directory using the Authorization Web Service and validating application security via the web service enabled QAT Security. With a few more days work, we were storing temporary session information in memory using the Session Service and sending email notifications directly from our application. The team enjoyed the look and feel so much that we began testing our work in the framework. All of this came right out of the box. Still, we were only utilizing about forty percent of WebDaptive's functionality.

WebDaptive enables the developer to focus mainly on coding business rules instead of getting bogged down in the intricacies of presentation, communication, security, and integration. Also, the learning curve is very small, allowing systems programmers to smoothly transition to the web and veteran web developers to concentrate on other aspects of a development project. From a purist’s perspective, its nice to see that such a full featured product can still be written in under 1MB. The entire framework itself is about 500 KB, while each of the (.NET version) web services weigh in at around 1MB each. Most of the configuration is handled in three central files, one for the tree control, one for the tabs, and one main framework configuration file that contains tokens for captions, optional web service URLs, and the global framework behavior. It also simplifies web service calls with prebuilt functions and an internal XML parser. One can literally make a web service call in about ten lines of code and the result will be returned parsed into a generic object along with the raw XML. There is plenty of support for customization including a complete library of javascript functions for performing common tasks such as trimming spaces, validating phone numbers, et. al., as well as, for interacting with the framework itself.

The documentation library is very complete and written from a developers point of view. There are descriptions and practical examples with sample output. Another nice touch is that the examples are usually written in several different languages such as VB .NET, Javascript, and Java. Also, the library itself is broken out in such a way as to make it easy to find what you are looking for. There is a main user’s manual and a document for each of the function libraries (Number Format, Drag and Drop, Calendar Control, etc.) and web services (Authorization, Session, Mail, Logging).

Having used WebDaptive on multiple projects now, I highly recommend it. It has become the starting point, in my mind, from which I will design/develop future applications. With many of the technical details of software applications accounted for, the ease of integration, and new releases constantly adding functionality, I know I will have a ‘leg up’ on future projects.

For more information, please visit QAT WebDaptive.