SC Producer

What you are about to read will sound like magic. Most readers will not be convinced until they see this tool in action. How could a small company build such a powerful tool?

The tool came from the source of most good software tools. It came about during the "heat of development" and has since been hardened and generalized. It didn't come from a research lab or university. It didn't even come from a venture-funded startup. It came from real developers building commercial systems with tight deadlines and heavy business pressures to deliver.

At the conceptual level the SC Producer uses a script to generate thin-client screens. The script has a number of important elements:

• the description of what information (fields) should be on every screen
• the business and validation rules which cope with user input
• the graphical template describing the look for each screen
• the navigation logic to determine what happens "next" depending upon user action
• all text associated with the screens or fields

The SC Producer is organized to deal with WorkCenters, Processes, Activities, Screens, Roles and Rules. A WorkCenter* is like a specialized office containing private data, specialized tools, business rules, and a responsible individual.

* Our thanks to Anatole Holt who first shared this idea in 1980 while working to build development environments for telecommunications systems.

An empowered system administrator determines which individuals will be allowed to access WorkCenters and the associated tools. WorkCenters interact via Processes to accomplish Activities. Activities require one or more Screens, unless they are AutomatedActivities, which may require no screens.

Of particular significance, the SC Producer also contains the full text of all specifications developed to describe a product to be constructed.

For every field, the SC Producer knows the official name of that field, as described in the corporate data dictionary, also stored in the SC Producer, of course.

The text associated with the screens or fields includes:

• all labels
• all menu choices
• all field hints
• complete field descriptions (field level help)
• complete screen descriptions (screen level help)
• process level help (help which spans multiple screens)

All this text is stored in a directory, which indicates the users' choice of natural language, including English, French or German.

Fields may contain any object.

Using this information the SC Producer generates the operational screens for an application, in HTML, XML and JavaScript. The HTML is generated separately in an HTML authoring tool like FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Not a single line of new code has to be written for each new screen. Thus business analysts can make substantial changes to applications as long as the changes do not require new business objects or attributes to be developed.

		© 2007 ShouldersCorp. All Rights Reserved.