NEWTERA E-CATALOG PLATFORM

Building Flexible E-Business Applications with Newtera E-Catalog Platform

What works today will not necessarily work tomorrow. Market changes, competitor evolves, and customer demands increase. More than ever, businesses require software applications to have tremendous flexibility in order to adapt to the changes without disrupting their day-to-day operations.

Building flexible and adaptable software applications isn't an easy task. According to a study by the Standish Group, almost a quarter of commercial software projects failed without creating any end result. A significant number of projects have exceeded the budget and taken longer than expected, either from poor design or changing requirements. Many of the completed projects are short-lived or have to start over again, due to their rigid designs or implementations that have prevented adaptability.

What factors cause this waste of IT time, money, and effort? Among many, one of key reasons is that many of projects have taken the approach of extensive custom programming, which makes business data model static and business logics hard-coded in the software. This approach has contributed to the problem of implementation and maintenance nightmares.

Newtera E-Catalog is an Enterprise Catalog Management platform that enables rapid developments of e-business applications with flexibility and adaptability. Newtera E-Catalog platform consists of an engine, tools, and API, as illustrated below. Its tools let you define the business data model and business logics for your e-business application. The business data model and business logics are captured as metadata and rules expressed in XML. Your e-business application embedding Newtera E-Catalog engine via its API is then driven by the metadata and rules that are externalized from the software code. By taking this so called "rule-based and data-driven" approach, you are able to quickly and securely change business data model and business logics to cope with the changes, without altering software code.

Key Features

Newtera E-Catalog platform provide the following key functional capabilities that are commonly required by most of e-business applications:

• Flexible Schema Support: A flexible schema reflecting the business data model can be created by non-technical users using a graphical tool. The schema can have categories, category-specific attributes, category relationships including is-a relationships for specifying category inheritance hierarchies. it also support multiple classification schemes, user-defined taxonomy hierarchies of arbitrary depth. The schema can be refined or even restructured over time.

• Flexible Query Support: A flexible schema isn't very useful if queries aren't flexible. E-Catalog tool lets users graphically define queries as data views without writing SQL statements. The engine can dynamically or statically generate SQL statements for search, insert, update, or delete based on schema and data view metadata. The queries can support both parametric and full-text searches.

• Data Validation Support: Implementing data validation logics is a tedious work for many applications. With E-Catalog, you can quickly define data validation logics using a combination of constraints and rules, and let the engine to perform auto data validations for you. You can also define rules that assign valid values to attributes automatically based on existing conditions.

• Metadata-driven Web Controls: Metadata-driven Web Controls are Web UI components that can change their appearances based on metadata and user privileges. They can be used by web developers as building blocks to construct a customized web user interface. Newtera E-Catalog comes with a set of metadata-driven web controls, such as forms, tables, trees, and so on.

• Access Control Support: Enterprises often require flexible and complicated data access control policies that can be very challenging to implement.  E-Catalog allows you to define user or role-based access control rules at category-level, attribute-level, and record-level.

• Integration Support: An e-business application may require multiple software components or sub-systems to work together to accomplish a task. To facilitate seamless integrations, Newtera E-Catalog provides an open interface based on industry standards, such as XML and Web Services.

• Enterprise Scalability & Performance: Newtera E-Catalog is designed with scalability and performance in mind. It can scale up easily to support any number of user requests. Combined with smart caching and optimized queries, it can quickly serve up information to users.

Developing e-business applications using Newtera E-Catalog platform not only saves your development effort tremendously but also ensures that your applications are able to meet challenging enterprise needs as well as adapt to the changes. Newtera E-Catalog is built on Microsoft .Net framework, therefore, does not require a third-party commercial application server. It runs on Microsoft Windows 2000, and currently supports both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases.