Skyway Software FAQs

Skyway offers introductory answers to frequently asked questions about the SOA market, our firm and, our point-of-view of the market, Skyway Software products, and benefits realized by our customers via SOA. Please click on a subject heading below to view questions and answers relating to your question. Links throughout the answers will guide you to further information on our website. If you have any further questions, please consult our Contact page or email us at info@skywaysoftware.com.

Table of Contents

SOA Market Questions

Skyway Company Questions

Skyway Product Questions

Customer Solutions

Next Steps

SOA Market Questions

What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

In general, SOA is more of a way of thinking than it is a specific set of technologies.  It’s an architectural idea that defines a set of services to implement a series of functional requirements. But instead of focusing on the details of how these functional requirements are implemented, service-oriented architectures look at the goal of the requirements.  Simply put, SOA is a framework for building an IT infrastructure. With SOA, IT delivers business functionality as shared, reusable services. Business processes drive the definition, creation and execution of these services.  Because you don’t have to rebuild each service from scratch, you can more quickly create new services to respond to business needs. 

Perhaps a bit more technically useful, Wikipedia defines SOA as, “a software architecture that defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of business processes and software users; resources on a network in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation.”

Why is SOA important?

When we talk to customers, we tend to get several common reasons:

  • To align business and IT with the goal of accelerating revenue-creation opportunities
  • To simplify and standardize application integration points and reduce their overall integration costs
  • To reduce the long-term maintenance cost of their future applications
  • To ensure that their applications support industry standards
  • To eventually achieve true re-usability across their entire portfolio of applications

SOA used today varies from customer to customer, and the differences are generally in the scope of their implementations. So some companies have started with enterprise-wide SOA initiatives, but many of them are still in the planning and their pilot phases. Others have chosen a significant application development project as a first major step towards adopting SOA. And some are just trying to determine if SOA is right for them in their IT organization.

What technical problems does SOA solve?

One of the biggest problems that CIOs face today is the so-called ‘spaghetti’ problem. And it’s a problem that occurs when point-to-point integration links build up over years or even decades and your integration diagram ends up looking like a plate of spaghetti.  One of the promises of SOA is to help solve this problem by standardizing these interfaces between the systems. The problem is that the easier you make it to create integration points, the more your IT organization will do it. So you end up with a significant danger that point-to-point services which aren’t centrally orchestrated and managed properly could actually lead to the ultimate death of service-oriented adoption amongst many large companies.  An even worse problem is that most IT organizations aren’t looking forward far enough to realize that this is going to be a serious problem.

Are there any other business benefits customers can realize when implementing an SOA?

Widely available research has shown that CIOs typically spend 70 to 90 percent of their budget maintaining legacy applications, largely because of the high cost of integrating diverse systems and facilitating change.  As a result, as little as 10 percent of a CIOs IT budget is allocated to moving to the innovative technologies needed to make the business more competitive.  Most CIOs would be thrilled to be able to maintain their legacy applications more efficiently and have the flexibility of using a greater amount, say 12 to 15 percent of their budgets, on investment in innovative approaches and technologies.  SOA can make that happen.

How long does SOA take?

SOA is a journey and SOAs don’t happen overnight; creating a service-oriented architecture is a journey of business-driven steps that gradually transform the enterprise’s IT architecture. Like the Internet, SOA is based on industry standards, not vendor preferences. As a result, services can run on any system—open or proprietary, compatible or not. You don’t need to buy new applications or hardware. You don’t need to throw out what you already have.  SOA orients your IT architecture around those services so you can build, combine and modify them faster and more easily. The various applications can share data, communicate and coordinate activity. 

With a traditional IT architecture, whenever a new need arises, you implement another IT solution.  Business need?  Build a new system. Update the need?  Build another system.  The result is a collection of applications that replicate the same steps over and over, but are executed in different ways across separate systems.  

Enter SOA. Despite the technical jargon that surrounds it, service-oriented architecture truly is for the business person, mapping IT to desired business results: By mapping IT to desired business results, SOA lets business owners make decisions with fewer limitations from IT.

Why Will SOA Succeed?

Building a foundation for SOA is a process, but once the foundation is in place, IT changes become faster and easier. If you make a change affecting multiple systems, you need only modify the one service that is reused in multiple instances across the enterprise.  Service-oriented architecture is not a panacea.  It will not solve every business and IT challenge. But with the right planning and execution, SOA can deliver important benefits today and tomorrow.  SOA makes IT less of a constraining factor in business decisions, because it’s easier for IT to turn the business’s ideas into reality.

What are the main obstacles to SOA?

Based on our SOA experience, as well as a review of widely available information, the No. 1 barrier that companies are seeing to adopting SOA is shortage of skills.  No. 2 was the difficulty in justifying the ROI of SOA projects. Skyway helps break down these and other barriers. We can provide the skills and best practices that we've honed through over numerous SOA customer engagements. We can help develop skills within your own organization and supplement with the expertise we have perfected. We can also help identify the right SOA projects for your organization to pursue with very attractive ROI.

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Skyway Company Questions

Who is Skyway?

With over 100 years of combined software industry knowledge, Skyway's leadership team has a successful history of developing proven market winners. As they did at TRADEX Technologies, the Leadership Team focuses on developing innovative enterprise-class solutions that provide real business value. Today, Skyway Visual Perspectives is uniquely positioned in the market because it offers a pragmatic approach to delivering standard J2EE, SOA-compliant applications that are infrastructure future-proof...more accurately and in half the time and of alternative delivery methods.

What does Skyway do or deliver?

We are an ISV and our solution is an application development platform that enables developers to build business services quickly, while delivering implicit and pragmatic SOA.  We use models to build services and we deploy these independently of the existing infrastructure.

What makes Skyway different from other organizations that claim to have the expertise and experience needed to take customers to a Service-Oriented Architecture?

Skyway has significant experience in heterogeneous environments.  We’ve gained this expertise from working with our customers, who have diverse environments and want to work with a company that understands the mix of technology they may have.  Skyway offers J2EE and we know how to meet the challenges of a heterogeneous environment.  For that reason, our capabilities will resonate in the market.

We also understand SOA and Web services and have the capability, matched by capacity around the globe, to deliver it.  We are currently training SOA architects around the world and are investing in bringing together our portfolio around the SOA methodology.

What does Skyway bring to the table that will materially benefit its customers? 

Skyway brings a completely fresh approach to developing and delivering software using a process we call Skyway Interactive Delivery.  It is comprised of three components:

Skyway Model Driven Development and Deployment (M3D)™ Platform, which is our model driven, SOA centric development platform.  It was built from the ground up to enable rapid development and deployment of reusable services, composite applications, and rich user interfaces using models rather than having to hand code.  The platform is a shared workspace where all roles involved in defining, developing, and deploying services and composite applications may collaborate using models to ensure the right software is developed the first time - no matter where developers are geographically located.     

Skyway Interactive Delivery™, which is an interactive development methodology that is enabled by the Skyway M3D platform.  At the core of this delivery approach is Skyway Interactive Prototyping™ which allows requirements to be easily and visually prototyped using a model.  Once the requirements are finalized, the prototype naturally evolves into the production application.  Nothing is wasted or re-done as with other requirements development/prototyping approaches. 

How is Skyway differentiated from others in the application development space like traditional leaders IBM/Rational, Compuware, CA etc?

Skyway’s offering is differentiated from the leaders of the last generation of software development tools in three key ways:

Skyway’s Model Driven Development and Deployment (M3D) platform was built from the ground up as a service oriented platform and is not a re-hashed client/server technology solution.  Skyway M3D Platform uses models - rather than hand coding - to build discrete reusable services, composite applications, and rich user interfaces, including much of the business logic.  By contrast, the offerings from IBM/Rational and Compuware (as examples) are both model “assisted” and they have had model constructs put on top of their code based frameworks.  These modeling constructs have been added ostensibly to make it easier to build software using their tools; however, you still have to drop down into Eclipse to hand code to build the software. 

Skyway’s M3D platform was architected to be a tightly integrated development and deployment environment rather than cobbled together from multiple products (as are the other vendors' products).  Everything in Skyway Visual Perspectives operates against a common model.  This enables for true collaboration using a shared workspace paradigm.  By contrast, IBM/Rational is a collection of products and perhaps more challenging, they typically are not compatible or extensible with competing products.

Skyway’s M3D platform can be used by a much less skilled programming resource than the offerings from IBM/Rational, Compuware, etc.  While you still must be a trained software developer to use Skyway, the training can be in Cobol, RPG, Lotus Domino, etc.  You do not have to be a trained Java developer to use Skyway to develop a well formed J2EE application.  By way of contrast, all of the resources that use the offerings from IBM/Rational, Compuware, etc. to develop J2EE applications must be proficient Java developers.  The net result of this is it is much easier – and significantly less expensive - to assemble a team to develop J2EE applications using Skyway Visual Perspectives compared to the other tools, which quickly translates to greater developer flexibility and much lower staffing costs.

What SOA benefits does Skyway offer?

Skyway’s Platform is a breakthrough technology that allows an organization to move towards a successful SOA implementation pragmatically, or in a phased approach, with business value achieved during the very first implementation.  We provide this real business value to our customers by demonstrating three unique capabilities:

  • Significantly enhance Software Developer’s value to the organization
  • Develop and deploy standards-based SOA applications 5x faster
  • Graphically deploy SOA applications anywhere anytime
  • Deliver applications that satisfy all the business requirements on the very first project

These game-changing capabilities allow software developers to concentrate on the business problem – not on generating application code. Equally important, the application produced is independent of its deployment architecture. The infrastructure is selected at the time the application is deployed and not before design and development has begun. 

Why are Skyway’s models important to service applications and do they reduce solution delivery time and cost?

Skyway’s patent-pending technology allows developers to construct quality business applications graphically, through modeling. Using these models, Skyway generates a well-constructed, high-quality Java application. Because the code is standard Java, developers can easily extend any Skyway application when needed.

  • Model service oriented solutions 5x+ faster than traditional methods—write code only when needed
  • The model becomes the code—complex production solutions built 100% by modeling are in use today
  • Higher quality solutions—models generate well formed industry standard, SOA compliant code

In addition to model-driven development, Skyway implicitly supports the most efficient architecture for executing web applications and SOA. Skyway generates well-behaved, correctly-structured services that when orchestrated form the application. These services are then available for any other application to utilize as-is or as a template for other services.

Modeling in Skyway is the next generation of graphical coding.  The constructs and operations used by developers in yesterday’s traditional coding environment are represented today using Skyway’s graphical models, which eliminate virtually all of the manual coding needed to build enterprise-class web applications.

Unlike typical quasi-modeling tools that only generate skeleton code and necessitate the need for supplemental, and oftentimes extensive, manual coding, Skyway’s pure-modeling tool extends throughout the logic-modeling and web-modeling layers to drastically (if not completely) eliminate coding requirements altogether.  In addition, these types of quasi-modeling tools require deep technical knowledge due to the coding complexity and perhaps worse, offer no real scalability or flexibility because the solution is tightly bound to the infrastructure.

What is Skyway’s Model-Driven Development and Deployment (M3D)?

Build Better Solutions Faster
Even entry-level developers become proficient with Skyway Builder within days. The use of graphical M3D typically compresses the design, development and testing phases of solutions by 3x for entry-level modelers and up to 10x or more for those proficient at modeling compared to even the most advanced and modern IDEs on the planet.

The models created in Builder are all metadata passed to Skyway Director, which generates industry-standard, highly-scalable J2EE. This code often outperforms code generated today by IT. Skyway-generated code is well-formed, entirely human-readable and can be opened inside of any Java code editor. It conforms to industry-standard best practices. It can even be extended.

Since Skyway code is always generated the same way, every time, consistent, higher-quality code is the net result. No longer will IT organizations find themselves dealing with the fall-out of poor coding late in the delivery cycle. Skyway-generated code is always top notch and immensely scalable.

Solutions Better Aligned with Business
One of the biggest challenges for IT today is that solutions that are often out-of-sync with what business really needs. With Skyway, a businessperson can sit beside a developer and look at the same models used to create the solutions and understand exactly what is designed. This same visualization on screen is automatically represented in HTML that can be distributed as the documentation of models.

Eliminate the Risk of Attrition
As employees leave an organization, IT often finds itself struggling to understand and maintain solutions within the enterprise. Models created within Builder are easy to understand and modify, eliminating this challenge. Any developer can look at the Skyway models and become proficient in their function in practically no time at all. This simplicity in maintenance not only eliminates the risks of employee attrition, but provides for a radically reduced Total Cost of Ownership for all solutions modeled within Builder.

Unlike typical modeling tools that only generate skeleton code and still require substantial manual coding, Skyway Models go all the way down to the logic-modeling and web-modeling layer and eliminate coding altogether.

What is Skyway’s Open Application Composition (OAC) and Dynamic Application Execution (DAE)?

Skyway fits exceptionally well within an enterprise by leveraging existing enterprise assets and complementing any SOA assets. For those with SOA investments in Registries, BPM and BPEL, or an ESB, Skyway complements those solutions and enhances their value. 

Open Orchestration
Skyway is able to discover, identify and leverage any java service and database that pre-exists within the Enterprise.  By easily importing these existing assets into Skyway’s development process, applications are built and deployed into the enterprise more rapidly than with traditional modeling tools or hand-coded applications.  Furthermore, Skyway is open to pre-existing Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and registries.  Services generated within Skyway are easily published to these technologies so that they can be reused throughout the enterprise.

Rich Internet Applications
Skyway Builder allows for the creation of Rich Internet Application and Web 2.0 content with Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX). Just as Skyway M3D allows you to construct new services through models and without writing code, Skyway OAC allows you to create rich applications without writing any Javascript or XML transformations.

Dynamic Application Execution (DAE)
Because Skyway uniquely separates the business logic from how it is executed, its models are never technology specific.  This allows developers a tremendous amount of flexibility when beginning a project.  Infrastructure deployment platforms (databases and application servers) are selected during the actual deployment phase of the application lifecycle—saving tremendous amounts of time previously dedicated to planning the deployment architecture before beginning work on the application.  All of this planning can take place in parallel with building the application, allowing business solutions to be delivered faster than with any other development technology.  A decision to change the deployment infrastructure simply means a quick re-deployment of the application models—never any changes to existing code.

Skyway is not just open to SOA-style tools; it also easily incorporates existing Java and database assets into M3D. Discovery of existing code is in no way required to build new solutions, but makes leveraging existing Java assets simple. Likewise, any standard relational database can be discovered from within Builder to leverage existing data models into new logic and services.

How does Skyway help me manage existing infrastructure challenges?

The database and application server selected by an organization today may not be the desired deployment infrastructure a year from now. Until now, applications were “hard wired” to their infrastructure. Skyway’s patent-pending technology changes this by separating the application code from its deployment architecture. During deployment of the application, Skyway integrates natively to the selected database and application server to provide ultimate flexibility without impacting performance.

Skyway is committed to supporting standards as they evolve. By redeploying your already-built and deployed applications, you can take advantage of any new or evolved standards supported in newer versions of Skyway.

  • Code tailored for performance and scalability – based on underlying infrastructure
  • Change infrastructure in minutes - zero impact to the business solutions
  • Embrace new technologies without changing model or code – from standard web apps to AJAX or from JDK1.4 to JDK 1.5, for example

Making a change from one database or application server to another is simply a matter of redeploying the application.

What is Skyway’s Platform Independent Execution (PIE)?

Models created within Skyway Builder are converted into platform-specific code by Director and then packaged and deployed to the underlying infrastructure. The models are not converted into code until the infrastructure is selected, allowing solutions to move from one application server and/or database to another with the click of a button.

High Performance – Tailored Code
The code produced from each underlying model is run through a patent-pending model-conversion engine within Skyway Director that constructs code appropriate to the infrastructure selected. This code is human-readable and uses industry standard design patterns optimized for scale and performance. The Skyway team has a history of building world-class applications that take optimal advantage of each application server and set of hardware to scale to many thousands of concurrent users with ultra-fast response times, often out-performing solutions constructed in IT organizations.

Technology Independent
Not only does Skyway Director make solutions infrastructure-independent: it makes them technology-independent, moving them seamlessly across new technologies. New versions of Director automatically exploit new releases of Java Development Kit (JDK) and application server software, and even new technology standards. Skyway customers that had been running applications for years were able to have JDK 1.5-, AJAX- and Web 2.0-style applications with a quick redeploy of their solutions. They simply updated their copy of Director and reran the deployment of the model and all of these new technologies were incorporated.

No recoding of a solution or complex porting is required when an enterprise migrates to new infrastructure.

What are the common alternatives and how does Skyway fit in?

Skyway is actually quite complimentary to tools like an ESB, BPM or Registry.  Skyway M3D is made to construct service that can feed directly into such infrastructure for use.  This allows you to see even greater value out of your Registry ESB or BPM tool by having a much larger library of services to leverage.

In addition, Skyway’s DAE capabilities in our Builder product are made to help solve the problem for you.  DAE is not a BPM or BPEL tool and does not support the same set of standards.  Instead, DAE is intended to enable you to build full end user applications while still service enabling what you build.  You can consume external web services and leverage existing enterprise assets such as databases and Java code and service enable all of them for use.

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Skyway Product Questions

What is Skyway Visual Perspectives?

The Skyway Visual Perspectives accelerates design, development, and deployment of SOA-based applications. It is a Model-Driven Development and Deployment platform that builds new, or assembles existing, services across multiple platforms from any type of data source. The Skyway Visual Perspectives includes two core products, Skyway Builder and Skyway Director, which include comprehensive capabilities consistent with the standard software development lifecycle.

What is Skyway Builder?

Skyway Builder is a graphical modeling environment for building even the most sophisticated business applications and it allows companies to build new and composite services applications in ways faster than if they used traditional development tools. The graphical modeling environment Builder provides is standards-based, and Builder generates services that can easily be assembled across multiple platforms from any type of data source.  Builder enables companies to create services and applications from scratch and entirely within a graphical Model Driven Development and Deployment (M3D) environment. Skyway M3D is a new paradigm in software development that goes far beyond modeling tools of the past and orchestration and BPM tools of today.

What is Skyway Director?

Skyway Director is a graphical environment for generating and deploying Skyway-built applications enterprise-wide. Skyway Director generates infrastructure- and platform-specific code (database and application server) directly from models previously built within Skyway – all without hand-coding deployment Javascript.   The models are not translated into code until the infrastructure is selected, allowing solutions to easily move from one application server and/or database to another with a click of a button.  Because the application is generated from the metadata that describes the models, there is never any infrastructure- or platform-specific code embedded by Skyway Builder.  No rerecording of a solution or complex porting is required when an enterprise or independent software vendor wishes to deploy its models to a new infrastructure platform.

What are the hardware and O/S software requirements for installing and running Skyway?

The Skyway Visual Perspectives can be installed on computers with any of the following operating systems:

  • Windows 2000 Server (Service Pack 4)
  • Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2)

Skyway applications can be deployed and run on Servers with any of the following operating systems:

  • Windows 2000 Server (Service Pack 4)
  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server (Service Pack 4)
  • Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2)

What database, application servers, and Web browsers are supported by Skyway?

The Skyway Visual Perspectives uses an embedded DBMS and therefore does not require an external DBMS to operate.  Skyway applications can be deployed and run using the following DBMS:

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (Service Pack 3a)
  • Oracle 10g
  • Sybase ASE 12.5.2
  • MySQL 4.1.x
  • PostgreSQL 8.0
  • DB2 UDB 8.1
  • DB2 AS/400

The Skyway Visual Perspectives uses an embedded Application Server and therefore does not require an external Application Server to operate.  Skyway applications can be deployed to and run using the following application servers:

  • JBoss 4.0.4
  • Weblogic 8.1
  • WebSphere 5.1.x

Skyway applications can be run using the following web browsers:

  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (Service Pack 2)
  • Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4

Does Skyway support XA, 2-phased commits?

Yes, Skyway works with XA compliant data sources.   In version 5.0, the newest release of the Skyway Visual Perspectives, processes can be defined with explicit steps to commit or rollback transactions.  The steps between the transaction steps can operate on any number of data sources and will all be included in the same underlying transaction.  When the commit or rollback steps are executed, the appropriate operation is executed against each of the XA-compliant data sources involved in the transaction. Skyway ships with a set of XA compliant JDBC drivers for most of the major relational database systems, including Oracle, MSSQL, Sybase, DB2, etc. Skyway also offers an intuitive wizard-based configuration screen for the creation and management of XA data sources for use with your generated software services. 

How does Skyway work with RDBMS standards, yet have business friendly names in the data/object models?

At deployment time, the database entity names are provided for the tables to be generated.  This allows for data objects in the models to have a different name than the actual database tables in the underlying RDBMS.  The same is true if you discover a table outside of Skyway and the matching data objects can be renamed to a more model friendly name. 

Does Skyway Visual Perspectives run on Linux Desktops and browsers?

The applications and software services generated by Skyway are standard J2EE-compliant packages which can be automatically deployed to application servers and relational databases running on a variety of operating systems.  Skyway validates its generated applications on Linux, Unix, and Windows based platforms.  Skyway’s design-time components (including Skyway Builder and Skyway Director) are all certified on Windows-based systems and the various Microsoft server operating systems.  We do not certify our design-time on non-Windows platforms at this time.

What types of Java code can be discovered?

The Skyway Java integration layer allows extension of Skyway Visual Perspectives to incorporate existing or newly created Java API’s for use within Skyway processes.  This integration layer uses standard reflection to provide an intuitive interface for importing and selecting the classes and methods utilized in a Skyway process.  A discovery wizard simplifies this process by automatically determining the types used for input parameters and the output parameter for each Java Method being discovered. Skyway Visual Perspectives automatically generates structure definitions for any input or output parameter, which represents a Java “bean” and creates appropriate mappings for any raw types.  The structures derived from the Java beans can be used within Skyway processes just as any other structure may be.  Skyway Visual Perspectives also automatically generates the binding code needed to convert information into the original Java bean type prior to invoking the imported Java API method, and provides the same service for the result of the API invocation.  This approach provides a simple and visual method for incorporating existing Java API’s within Skyway processes.  Because Skyway Visual Perspectives uses Java’s reflection capabilities during process execution, each Java bean follows the standard bean metaphor and contains getters and setters for bean attributes and public constructors.  Skyway Visual Perspectives automatically packages imported Java .jar files into the generated software package and also makes it available within the Model repository providing a mechanism for packaging and reusing existing API’s in a service-oriented and model-based solution.

How is persistence handled/managed?

Skyway generated applications provide a flexible set of persistence options which range from automatically generated J2EE compliant container managed persistent entity beans, all the way to direct SQL invocations through our execute SQL step.  Skyway can integrate with existing relational database tables through a discovery mechanism which is similar to our Java service discovery mechanism in that each discovered table can be represented in Skyway as a structure and data store. Again, these structures and data stores can be utilized in any Skyway process and Skyway Visual Perspectives automatically generates the code required to persist data into the preexisting relational database tables.  We can handle complex relationship mapping and composite primary key mappings as well as providing an XA compliant interface to your existing databases as described above.  For structures which are created within the Skyway modeling environment, each structure will be generated as an entity bean and will be mapped to an automatically generated table based on configuration options provided at deploy time rather than at runtime.  This allows system administrators to easily transition the same set of applications and services to different database types without the need to update the original model.  In all cases, Skyway has provided a runtime execution framework which capitalizes on the inherent strengths of EJB while also providing optimizations around caching and searching which have been derived from an extensive background in constructing and architecting optimized J2EE applications.  The criteria used for searching can be modeled in object field notation or when preferable, direct SQL can be incorporated providing a range of options to process designers.

How do you deal with source control?

Inherent within Skyway Builder is its model-management functionality (Skyway Model Manager), which manages and versions the models.  Our versioning goes far beyond just the service; we version every piece of the model.  As a result there is not a huge amount of concurrence needed due to the granular level of versioning.  The nature of Skyway’s model-driven development and deployment (M3D) approach significantly reduces the need for two developers to work on the same part of a model concurrently and we support branching so development can be completed concurrently on different versions.

How is an application developed (in Skyway Visual Perspectives) then deployed on a Java based application servers? Is it an ear file (we use Tomcat, which doesn't support ear files)?
 
Skyway applications are deployed through an ear file since all Skyway applications are deployed as true n-tiered solutions.  Tomcat is actually included with JBoss as its web server of choice and is fully supported.  The Skyway Visual Perspectives significantly simplifies application deployment through Skyway Director, which enables you to select/model/configure your runtime environment (application server and DBMS).  The platform provides the ability to either completely automate the deployment process or nearly automate (meaning it will generate and package the runtime application for the Operations Team to use).  Note that since you are using models to develop, you select the application server (e.g., WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, etc.) and the DBMS for a specific technical environment (e.g., Integration Test, UAT, Performance Test, Production, etc.) at the point in time in which you are ready to deploy through Skyway Director.

Is there any component of Skyway that has to be deployed with applications once the application is deployed on production? If yes, is there a way to eliminate that dependency?

Skyway applications are J2EE applications and the code is 100% J2EE compliant.  There are some Skyway-produced super classes to the code that are generated, as well as several dozen open source libraries that are utilized by the generated application.  All are standard Java and well-documented, and the code for all super classes is included within Skyway Visual Perspectives.

What types of applications are not suitable for this environment?

It is important to understand that Skyway is not a silver bullet and is not for every project. Skyway was designed and architected to facilitate the creation of highly scalable, transactional web applications and services. The areas where Skyway does not fit are the same areas where J2EE applications do not fit, which are primarily around bulk data manipulation and non-web based applications. It is important to note the distinction that Skyway produces high performing J2EE solutions, but this does not mean it reaches outside the boundaries of J2EE. For processing large volumes of data in Monte Carlo Simulations or Supply Chain planning, J2EE is not the platform to use.

Below are some examples of solutions where Skyway excels and provides great value in both speed and flexibility:

  • Rich Internet Applications
  • Web Services
  • Composite Services
  • Transactional Services
  • Transactional Applications

How can you utilize published APIs that do not conform to SOA standards??

If the published APIs are in a Web Services (WSDL) or Java Archive (JAR) format, then Skyway can discover and use those APIs. Some of our customers who did not have APIs built in these technologies have created Java wrappers or Web Services around those APIs so that the functionality can be discovered and consumed by Skyway.

How could you integrate applications such as Flash or instant messaging into the application?

Skyway’s technologies are standard J2EE web applications and not proprietary. This allows for many architectural exits for the purpose of extending the application’s functionality. In the case of Flash, or any Web UI rich controls that are not packaged with Skyway’s suite of web controls, Skyway allows the developer to add custom code or controls just like any other WYSIWYG UI Editor (e.g. Dreamweaver). In fact, we have several customers who have integrated Flash into their Skyway applications.

What skill sets are needed to build, deploy and support applications?

Skyway Visual Perspectives does not require a Java development background for use, but it does require knowledge of programming concepts. COBOL, RPG, Visual Basic, HTML developers and others will find Skyway Visual Perspectives an easy way to start building J2EE based web applications without having to learn the deep details and nuances of J2EE.

Skyway Visual Perspectives uses concepts that are familiar to developers of all languages and puts those together in an easy-to-use interface that abstracts out the deep complexity of building J2EE applications. Our current customer base includes a wide range of developer skill sets, including Domino, Visual Basic, RPG and COBOL developers.

In order to deploy and support applications, the skill sets needed would be the same skill sets needed for operations folks who have the skills to manage standard application servers and databases.

Can you clarify the difference between building SOA components and consuming them within the tool?

The only difference is in the actual creation of the Skyway design construct (aka SOA component). When consuming SOA components, Skyway discovers a pre-built piece of functionality (e.g. a Web Service, External Data Source or Java Service) for use in the modeling environment. There is no difference when using Skyway built constructs and consuming them in the modeling environment because once design constructs are created or consumed, they are stored in the same meta-data format.

How would you approach complex business applications that include thousands of rules?

Typically, complex applications are designed and segmented into different, reusable Skyway projects and services. This enables better maintenance and configurability for applications that may contain complex logic, like a rules engine. With faster development speeds, Skyway has proven to be a beneficial platform in building complex applications.

Has the tool been used to create database centric batch processes?

Yes, it has. However, as noted in the answer above, J2EE is not the most efficient technology for processing large volumes of data in a batch environment.

Are there pre-built components to handle rendering MS Office documents?

Yes, Skyway Visual Perspectives comes with two pre-built web controls that allow you to upload/download documentation from a web page. The Skyway Media Upload web control adds file upload capabilties to a web page, so that at runtime, a user is able to upload any type of file, including images, PDFs, and MS Office documents such as Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. The Skyway Media Hyperlink web control adds file download capabilities to a web page, so that at runtime, a user is able to open/save any type of file, including images, PDFs, and MS Office documents such as Excel spreadsheets and Word documents.

How does the tool make decisions regarding application architecture choices for state management, security, caching and other choices?

In general, Skyway defers to the J2EE application server services for application architecture configurations for caching, security, etc, but here are some specifics on each topic listed above:

State Management
Skyway provides a visual design environment which allows service and UI developers the ability to create and manage variables which can be used to store and manage state. Skyway provides point and click configuration of steps which can update state in memory, in the session, on the database, or even on the file system.

Security
Skyway allows each deployment domain to configure the LDAP or Relational Database security provider that is used to authenticate and authorize the J2EE standards based applications that we generate. Skyway utilizes the underlying application server’s JAAS security configuration for authentication, and provides a nice interface to create web applications that utilize a user’s roles to customize and control their access at runtime.

Caching
Skyway generated applications utilize a combination of the J2EE caching services built into the application server container and a POJO cache which are tuned to provide greater performance and scalability.

Other
Skyway provides wizard based configuration screens that allow some of the most common deployment configurations to be made from within the Skyway environment including Data Source configuration, Server Configuration, and late binding of the data model to physical relational database systems just to name a few.

Please explain how the tool could be used to build portlets within BEA Aqualogic

When creating the web layer through Skyway, the developer has the ability to check a checkbox that creates a WSRP-compliant portlet upon deploy. These portlets are consumable by any portal technology that adheres to the WSRP specification. BEA Portal is one of the vendor portal solutions that our QA team certifies against.

How does the application contemplate common security exposures such as cross site scripting and SQL injection?

Skyway applications are generated as standard J2EE applications which utilize .jsp pages that reflect the design intentions of the Skyway Developer. The Skyway Web Layer is designed to only create variable references that were designed to be available on any given page or in any given context and prevents access or modification of variables that were not scoped to be modified by a particular page. The database access that is generated by Skyway does not allow nested SQL scripts to be injected into form fields, for example, however the platform does allow developers the option of creating their own SQL, in which case the responsibility for protecting that SQL string belongs to the Skyway Developer. Skyway does not eliminate the need to protect your applications from cross site scripting attacks, and safeguards built into the browser/web server layers are respected.

Can you illustrate how Skyway utilizes connection pooling as well as connection caching? Also, detail how Skyway releases cached connections once a high watermark period has completed?

Skyway utilizes the connection pooling technologies that are built into the application server container. Skyway provides a simplified configuration screen to create Application Server data sources and passes these common configuration options, like min and max connections, through to the application server. Each application server provides advanced data source configuration options which can be used to tune application performance, and Skyway generated applications respect changes made to these configurations and will capitalize on them when they are made.

Skyway ships with an OEM version of the DataDirect Driver line which are made available to our customers at no additional charge. Data Direct is a trusted name in commercial quality JDBC drivers. Skyway can also be configured to work with the JDBC drivers that are shipped by other 3rd party vendors, as well as those drivers that are shipped directly from the RDBMS vendor.

How often are security updates released? How often are general releases made available to customers?

Skyway generally releases software on the following schedule:

  • Major Release – Annually
  • Minor Release – Semi-Annually
  • Planned Maintenance – Quarterly
  • Hot Fixes – As needed

Skyway has never shipped a security specific patch; however, we have provided JDK updates to our customers proactively when exploits are discovered at that level. We have performed similar updates for our customers when JBoss provides security patches. Our customers regularly install their own Operating System and Database security patches and upgrades.

Has Skyway ever had application security assessments performed on the Skyway platform?

No, it has not. However, our applications are being used to perform mission critical functions at companies like TD Ameritrade, British American Tobacco, and Enporion Online Marketplaces.

Typically, our application landscape involves the use of a WebSphere Application Server with an underlying IBM Internet HTTP Server component connecting back to an Oracle 10gR2 database platform. How does Skyway address performance when deploying code to these highly scalable platforms?

Skyway generated applications are preconfigured to utilize as many of the application server technologies as possible to ensure compatibility and performance in each of the unique environments that we support. Skyway Application Architects have created templates and supporting classes that are used when generating applications that are geared towards each application server environment to deal with the specializations which may be required. Skyway has built a runtime platform which is bundled with each application that utilizes a combination of POJO based caching and EJB based fault tolerance to optimize application reliability and performance.

What types of performance tuning occurs at code-generation time for these platforms?

Skyway provides a pluggable DAO layer which has been tailored for each of the supported RDBMS platforms to achieve the highest database performance possible. Our code generation and application server specific classes take into consideration the idiosyncrasies of the target environment, including optimizations around web layer caching of remote references, minimization of certain API calls known to be slower in certain app server environments, etc. In general, Skyway attempts to minimize the differences between the code that is generated for each of our target platforms, but we do alter the generation where necessary. We generally prefer to rely on a factory based metaphor to instantiate the appropriate handler classes for each environment.

Do you support WebSphere Application Server 6 as well as Oracle 10gR2 (10.2.0.2)?

In the current version of Skyway Visual Perspectives, we support WebSphere Application Server 5.1.1 and Oracle 10gR1.

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Customer Solutions

I’m interested in learning more about the capabilities of the Skyway Visual Perspectives and how it may help me reduce my application backlog and extend my legacy applications.  Where can I find more information?

Please refer to our website, www.skywaysoftware.com for a link to take a test drive of our Skyway Builder product, which offers Model Driven Development and Deployment and Open Application Composition functionalities, and our Skyway Director product, which provides Platform Independent Execution capabilities.  You may also contact our Director of Inside Sales at 813.288.9355, Option 3, who can help align you with one of our Field Sales Directors or Customer Enablement Managers.  You also may simply send us an email at info@skywaysoftware.com and we will follow up with you directly.

I am working with a few legacy applications myself and am challenged with an ongoing inability to develop custom solutions needed by the business units.  Would the Skyway Visual Perspectives offer similar benefits and efficiency gains to me as the ones you’ve just described for a Commerce One environment?

In a word, yes.  The Skyway Visual Perspectives accelerates design, development and deployment of SOA-based applications.  It is a Model-Driven Development and Deployment platform that builds new or assembles existing services across multiple platforms from any type of data source.

How do I integrate with my legacy applications?

Legacy applications are frequently at the core of your IT environment. But many times, these essential applications are isolated and inaccessible to common skill sets. Without the right skills and tools, it can be difficult to integrate these core investments with the rest of your IT environment. However, Skyway can make this much easier. Skyway can help you identify discrete elements within your legacy applications and "extend" them for use as services within your SOA.

How does the Enterprise Service Bus relate to SOA?

The Enterprise Service Bus is a core element of any SOA. ESBs provide the "any to any" connectivity between services within your own company, and beyond your business to connect to your trading partners. But SOA does not stop at just implementing an ESB. Depending on what your goals are, you may want to use an ESB to connect other services within your SOA such as information services, interaction services and business process management services. Additionally, you will need to consider development services and IT service management services. The SOA reference architecture can help you lay out an SOA environment that meets your needs and priorities.

An ESB is and should be the registry for all available reusable services within an enterprise.  Furthermore, it manages easy access to these reusable services no matter where they actually reside – from anywhere in the enterprise.  These key benefits alone deliver a huge benefit to any organization. But like any solution, an ESB lives in an ecosystem of added tools that are needed to capture real overall value.  The value of an ESB is measured by the number of services it contains and how often those services are re-used across applications.  An enterprise need not be constrained by the tools provided by the ESB vendor merely because they have an ESB already in service.  Instead, maximize the business and technology value of your ESB investment by looking across the board to find the best and fastest way to construct the applications that solve your business needs.

How does Skyway work with MQ (IBM’s WebSphere MQ)?

This really depends on the edition of MQ you are using.  The most current versions provide connectivity using SOA.  Since Skyway is 100% inherently SOA it is very easy for us to integrate with an SOA source like MQ.  If however you are using and older version of MQ then a Java API wrapper can be written to communicate with the MQ queues.  Many organizations that are using MQ will likely already have these APIs in place for facilitating integration of MQ and other tools.  These Java API’s interfaces to MQ can then be discovered within Skyway and leveraged within the modeling environment.  

Can Skyway really handle building complex applications/services?

Our clients are developing and managing a number of complex interdependent applications/services with Skyway Builder, and Skyway Director and we welcome the opportunity to engage in extended technical discussions in order to validate our comprehensive value to our customers and partners.  Please contact us at info@skywaysoftware.com for more information.

BPM and BPEL solutions already claim to do what Skyway does, so am I potentially duplicating my capability and my investment?

The major use of BPM solutions is to orchestrate business processes.  If you have a large amount of infrastructure available with numerous services and applications they are very powerful; however, it is very difficult to implement a completely new application or service without having the infrastructure behind it. If we consider the process to hire/onramp a new employee – at some point the steps have to call out to other systems or workflow.   This is where we complement the BPM/BPEL solutions.  Skyway can build the new services or applications from scratch and you can leverage the orchestration of your existing solutions.  In the event you do not have a BPM/BPEL, Skyway provides the orchestration for you.

Some of our Java based applications are hosted on Tomcat (Servlet container), since there is no need for an EJB container in those applications. Will Skyway support it?

Skyway Applications are deployed as true J2EE applications, which means they will have a web, business, and data access layer.  Since you develop your application at an abstract level through visual models, you get this n-tier application for free.  Even in cases where you feel that there really isn’t a need for the business layer (i.e., only need the web and data access), there is benefit from using the container managed persistence (e.g., connection pooling) – but teams typically want to avoid the coding/maintenance/operational aspect of EJB when they only see the need for web/data access – but you get this for free when using the modeling environment in Skyway.

How difficult is it to reuse existing code and convert them to services? We would like to reuse a lot of our existing code and convert the appropriate pieces to services--is this possible with Skyway Visual Perspectives?

The Skyway Visual Perspectives provides a robust “discover & use” mechanism which includes the ability to discover & use existing Java code.  In some cases you may need to create a wrapper class to truly make the existing Java code ready to be part of a service – we can help you with this process.

Is non Java/J2EE based application development supported?

Yes, although limited to the “discover & use” mechanism – i.e., you can not model your solution with the Skyway Visual Perspectives and then generate a non J2EE application.  What you can do is develop in any language (e.g., COBOL) and then have that code exposed either through either web service or through a Java class, which can be discovered and used within Skyway.

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Next Steps

How do I get started?

SOA is best approached as a collection of individual projects - each of which bring to your business greater flexibility and service orientation. Successful SOA adoption is completed incrementally stressing the importance of starting small, and scaling appropriately. Skyway can help you identify what SOA projects make the most sense for you. Regardless of whether you're looking to SOA for an enterprise-level project, a tactical technology-level project or something in between, Skyway can help you lay out a roadmap that makes sense for you and we can bring together Skyway 's SOA architects and subject matter experts and your IT staff to help find projects to boost your business flexibility with quick financial return.

Can I buy an SOA or must I build one?

To move your organization toward greater service orientation, you need to take a balanced approach to building versus buying. To create the infrastructure for an SOA, you'll need the right commercial off-the-shelf software that complements (rather than replaces) your existing IT infrastructure. This is a “buy” statement. On the “build” side, you may also choose to access know-how and hands-on involvement to use these software products effectively and get the most out of them. This infrastructure and the associated tools can help you create the business services that run on your SOA. Again, there is some “building” associated with this. So the real answer is that you need a certain measure of both building and buying. Skyway has worked hard to develop software that satisfies the vast majority of repeatable business needs for SOA. At the same time, we have a deep portfolio of experience with past customers that we can access to help you meet any unique needs you may have.

I’m interested in learning more about the capabilities of the Skyway Visual Perspectives and how it may help me reduce my application backlog and extend my legacy applications.  Where can I find more information?

Please refer to our website, www.skywaysoftware.com for a link to take a test drive of our Skyway Builder product, which offers Model Driven Development and Deployment and Open Application Composition functionalities, and our Skyway Director product, which provides Platform Independent Execution capabilities.  You may also contact our Director of Inside Sales at 813.288.9355, Option 3, who can help align you with one of our Field Sales Directors or Customer Enablement Managers.  You also may simply send us an email at info@skywaysoftware.com and we will follow up with you directly.

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