Companies are quickly adopting the Internet as a business channel for increasing revenues and decreasing costs. To fully leverage the efficiencies of this channel, companies must move their strategic business processes to the web and create customized, tailored web applications for their customers, partners and employees. The trouble is that web applications still take too long to build, are too hard to tailor, and require too much intensive, ongoing operational maintenance. Companies sometimes run into a wall when building just a few web applications, when in reality — to gain value — they must build many. So, although companies hope to leverage the Internet to streamline costs and increase revenues, the cost of developing customized web applications overwhelms the potential benefits.
Concurrent with the trend of moving business processes to the Internet is the industry movement to a service-based software development model, often described as web services. Web services enable software, and the corporate assets they represent, to be broken down, spread out, re-purposed and re-assembled into composite web applications. With tools available today, web services and existing legacy components must be hard-wired together to create new applications. When a new, customized version of an application is required, programmers have to re-wire the components, creating another one-off application. This approach to developing composite web applications requires enormous programming efforts and simply will not scale. Thus, the componentization of software has revealed a need for a new software automation system that changes the economics of software creation.
Bowstreet, a recognized leader in web services, introduces its 4th generation software automation system for creating highly customized, composite web applications:
Bowstreet Business Web Factory 4. The Business Web Factory dramatically lowers the costs of creating and maintaining web applications. Among its many enhancements are the following new features:
The major components, features, and benefits of our software automation system are:
BENEFITS
Application customization and management by non-technical users
Reusable, intelligent software builders
Protect Your Investments
SUPPORTED PLATFORMS
BROWSERS
DATABASES
WEB PROXY SERVERS
DIRECTORY SERVERS
APPLICATION SERVERS
More can be found at: http://www.bowstreet.com/products
Source: Bowstreet
SOLUTION
Bowstreet Business Web Factory is a software automation system that assembles components and web services into customized applications. Bowstreet's patent-pending technology, parametric automation, is a revolutionary improvement to the traditional software development practices of explicitly coding applications and hard-wiring components together. With Bowstreet, developers build parametric models that assemble applications on the fly. By providing different inputs to the model, unique variations of the application are produced. Thus, Bowstreet enables developers to capture and automate the process of building composite web applications instead of explicitly coding the application.
Centrally managed, system-wide, automated change propagation
Applications based on Bowstreet's technology are designed for flexibility and managing change. Should any system level change be required, developers make the change centrally, propagating it throughout an entire family of applications. As a result, adding new features or making changes to functionality no longer breaks every related application, greatly reducing the need for costly regression testing. So, when last-minute requests for changes come in (as they inevitably do), developers respond quickly while maintaining the quality of the project.
Bowstreet's technology allows for the customization and creation of new web applications to be delegated to non-technical business managers, partners or even the end users themselves. With business users empowered to maintain and modify deployed applications, developers are free to focus on more important, strategic work rather than tedious maintenance of existing applications. In addition, business user control means that changes can be made rapidly, thereby reducing time-to-market and greatly improving service levels.
Developers can use Bowstreet's technology to create intelligent, reusable software agents we call builders. Builders automate all types of application functionality, from the simple
(UI controls, data transforms) to the complex (process flow). Builders are powerful because they can be reused across multiple applications and across many different organizations without requiring custom, hand-coded changes. To jump-start development efforts, Bowstreet makes available over 100 builders out-of the-box. In addition, Bowstreet offers integration builders that provide 'snap-in' connectivity to SAP R/3, MQ Series, COM, PeopleSoft, and many other common systems and technologies. The net result is that Bowstreet's automation technology reduces the time-to-market and the total cost of all composite web applications — starting with the first one.
Bowstreet offers a totally open and vendor-neutral system designed to leverage and extend existing software infrastructures and emerging web services. Bowstreet's system plugs into existing development environments and runs on common current deployment architectures such as BEA WebLogic Server™ and IBM WebSphere® Application Server. Bowstreet's flexible, standards-based architecture also enables customers to quickly create very robust integrations with their back-end applications as well as the external applications of their partners and customers. By choosing Bowstreet, companies can protect their investments in their current infrastructure while "future proofing" them for the emerging web services revolution.
OPERATING SYSTEMS
>Microsoft® Windows® 2000
>Microsoft® Windows NT®
>Sun™ Solaris™
>Microsoft® Internet Explorer
>Netscape® Navigator®
>IBM DB2 Universal Database
>Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000
>Oracle®
>Apache
>Microsoft® Internet Information Server (IIS)
>iPlanet™ Web Server, Enterprise Edition
>Netscape® Directory Server
>Novell® NDS®
>Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Active Directory
>BEA WebLogic Server™ 6.x
>IBM WebSphere® Application Server 4.x
Front Page
A Seismic Shift in Business, A Perfect Storm in Software
BOWSTREET™ BUSINESS WEB FACTORY Data Sheet
Gartner Files: The Future of Web Services: Dynamic Business Webs
Gartner Files: Service-Oriented Development of Applications: SODA Pops
Gartner Files: The 90/10-10/90 Rule for Portal Deployment
Gartner Files: Bowstreet Refocuses as Web Services Become Mainstream
Bowstreet Web Services Report Web Letter is published by Bowstreet. Additional editorial material supplied by Gartner, Inc. © 2001. Editorial supplied by Bowstreet is independent of Gartner analysis and in no way should this information be construed as a Gartner endorsement of Bowstreet's products and services. Entire contents © 2001 by Gartner, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.
