Home/Document Orientation: Enterprise Within Everyone's Reach

Enterprise web applications are confronted with the problems of distribution, control, scalability and stability. They cannot be created without an appropriate control framework. This is why J2EE architecture and Spring + Hibernate frameworks are largely used in the development of this type of applications. On the other hand, however, the use of these architectures is particularly complex. Development times and costs increase while requesting the support of expert developers.

Instant Developer includes an entity management framework which can deal with such problems and resolve them. This framework is called "Document Orientation" and provides the functionalities needed by Enterprise applications in the most rapid, simple manner.

Its name is derived from the object-oriented approach (OO, Object Orientation) on which it is based and is especially adequate for developing data handling oriented applications. In.de calls a structured set of related data a "document". For instance, an order is a combination of the data contained in the heading, rows, order line discounts, and so on. This shifts application development from object-oriented programming to document-oriented programming.

In this learning pathway the main Document Orientation functionalities will be described and the simplification level provided in developing any type of Enterprise or other application will be highlighted.

Learning Pathway

1. Document Definition
2. ORM Features
3. Interaction with Presentation Layer
4. Document Services
5. DO and SOA

Home/Document Definition

In Document Orientation, a document is an abstract representation of a hierarchy of data interrelated to each other. For example, a sales order may be modeled as a set of data contained in the heading, rows and order line discounts. In the DO model this sales order is represented as an Order Heading document containing the heading information plus a collection of Order Row sub-documents. Each one of these documents in turn contains row information plus a collection of Order Line Discounts sub-documents.

A particularly complex document: a management system.

Instant Developer can support the creation of entities starting from a database E/R schema as well as the opposite option. For option number one mentioned above, which is by far the most widely used, In.de features interesting simplifications and automated behaviors.

In the abovementioned order example, the documents and sub-documents constituting the order has occurred simply by dragging & dropping tables pulled from the database.

There is no need for the document properties to coincide with the table properties. Properties can be added or removed freely.

The link between the entities constituting a document is called a collection. A drag & drop operation is sufficient to create the necessary collections. The collection creation process also identifies the relationship (foreign key) to be used for loading such collection in a database.

As is shown in the images above, In.de allows you to view a diagram of the document structure to analyze its single parts.

Finally, extended entities can be automatically created with Instant Developer starting from base entities. As a matter of fact, In.de can detect 1-1 relationships identifying the presence of entities acting as bases for the current entity.

Diagram of database tables representing Legal Persons as an extension of the Person object.

Let's now move on to an analysis of the ORM features of Document Orientation.