Skyway Visual Perspectives

Skyway Visual Perspectives is a highly advanced model-centric development and deployment environment for rapidly delivering web services and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for Spring and Spring MVC.  What makes Skyway Visual Perspectives unique is its ability to deliver standard JEE applications 30% faster than traditional hand-coding methods because it offers a seamless blend of modeling and coding via Eclipse.  The benefit of this productivity gain is a powerful IT value proposition where custom software applications can finally be delivered en masse because the time required to build, test, maintain and enhance solutions is significantly reduced.

Because SOA applications are built from distributed services that can be loosely and/or tightly coupled, the solutions tend to have more moving parts and require a different set of tools to guarantee a successful implementation.  As a result, two very distinct environments have evolved to efficiently support the SOA application delivery ecosystem: the development environment and the runtime environment.  In the development environment, the SOA application is scoped, developed and deployed, whereas in the runtime environment, management functions such as application execution, Service Level Agreements (SLA) and governance occur. 

High Level Application Lifecycle

Skyway Visual Perspectives creates a model-centric development environment where applications are built, delivered, enhanced and maintained (using MVC delivery patterns).

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Skyway Visual Perspectives Functional Areas

Skyway Visual Perspectives addresses three functional areas of software delivery – each focused on specific capabilities necessary for delivering high-performing, standard JEE SOA-based applications:

  • Application Development
  • Application Deployment
  • Open Integration

Discussed in detail below, these functional capabilities of Skyway Visual Perspectives - and its two product variants, Skyway Builder CE and Builder EE - provide a comprehensive toolset for developing and deploying RIAs and Web Services at speeds and alignments never seen before in the software delivery market.  Skyway Builder is available in two versions:

  • Skyway Builder Community Edition - our free, open-source application development tool, read more here
  • Skyway Builder Enterprise Edition - with additional security, EJB deploy capabilities, and support options

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Application Development with Skyway Builder occurs in a graphical modeling environment (and Eclipse plug-in) for building, testing and deploying even the most sophisticated business applications. Unlike other modeling tools, Skyway Builder allows developers to create all layers of a typical RIA, namely:

  • UI layer (and web controls)
  • Logic layer
  • Data layer

Skyway Builder enables companies to create services and applications in a fraction of the time it would take with existing modeling tools and/or straight hand-coding.  Skyway Visual Perspectives creates a shared environment where developers and customers can leverage work performed by any individual on the team, so Skyway Builder models are managed in a single place allowing them to be viewed, used as templates or reused altogether in a completely different application. Collaboration ensures that distributed development teams can Product Marketecturepass requirements, specifications and models between themselves without concern over geographic locations or time zone differences. JUnit tests are generated automatically with the models. Using Skyway Builder, organizations now have flexibility over how they structure their development teams without the concern of miscommunication or incomplete hand-offs.

Application Deployment with Skyway Builder also occurs in a graphical environment for generating and deploying Skyway-built applications enterprise-wide (in Spring). It generates infrastructure- and platform-specific code (for the most common open source and commercial database and application servers) directly from models previously built within Skyway Builder.  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 recoding 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.

Skyway Open Integration capabilities allow enterprises to leverage their investments in existing technologies.  With the openness and flexibility of Eclipse and Spring, the integration layer allows Skyway Visual Perspectives to focus on what it does best: core development and deployment of SOA-based applications and services, while offering additional compatibility with added-value technologies in the complementary areas of development (such as HTML editors), execution (such as ESB and governance) and infrastructure platforms (such as databases, application servers and portals).   

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Skyway Visual Perspectives Value Proposition

Skyway Visual Perspectives creates a visual modeling environment that enables developers (of all programming languages and skill sets) to build highly-scalable, web-based applications and services typically at the first release and typically in 30% less time (when compared to traditional methods).  Solutions built with Skyway Visual Perspectives deploy as industry-standard JEE code and run inside a wide variety of open-source and commercial application servers and databases – without any proprietary run-time engines!

Skyway Visual Perspectives delivers three innovative capabilities that enable enterprises to deliver JEE applications more quickly and more accurately than ever before:

  • Model-Centric Development
  • Open Extensible Model
  • Model-Centric Deployment

With these capabilities, applications developed via Skyway Visual Perspectives are implicitly flexible and support organizations who believe in aligning IT with business as a necessity to ensure their long-term success.

Model-Centric Development:  An Eclipse plug-in, Skyway Builder is not like model driven tools of the past, where models produced only use cases and high-level code skeletons.  Skyway Builder creates domain specific models so the developers model actual business functionality without worrying about the underlying code.  Skyway Builder produces the code from the models and that code can be compiled and deployed in Spring anywhere throughout the enterprise.  This code-reduction aspect using Skyway Builder enables much faster generation of solutions, anywhere from 3x to 10x depending upon the skill of the developer. 

Open Extensible Model:  Skyway Software is committed to providing our customers with choice and the ability to leverage existing investments.  Open extensible models offer two capabilities that accomplish our goal.

  • Open Orchestration – Skyway Builder is able to discover, identify and leverage any java service or database that pre-exists within the enterprise.  By easily importing these existing assets into our development process, applications are built and deployed into the enterprise more rapidly than with traditional modeling tools or hand-coded applications.  Furthermore, Skyway Visual Perspectives easily integrates with pre-existing Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and registry technologies and services generated within Skyway Builder are easily published to these technologies so that they can be reused throughout the enterprise.
  • Rich Internet Applications – Skyway Builder creates RIAs and Web 2.0 content with Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX).  Just as Skyway Builder allows developers to construct new services through models without writing code, it allows developers to create rich web applications without writing any Javascript or XML transformations.

For individual or corporate use, developers may build custom steps to use and re-use services, data, business logic, and other assets using the flexibility and openness of Skyway Builder models.

Model-Centric Deployment:  Because Skyway Builder uniquely separates the business logic from how it is executed, its models are never technology specific.  The Java code in the final solutions is well-formed, fully readable, and easily reproduceable.  This affords developers tremendous flexibility when beginning a new project because infrastructure deployment platforms (databases and application servers) can be selected “late cycle” 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 much faster when compared to any other development technology.  A decision to change the deployment infrastructure simply means a quick re-deployment of the application models without any changes to the existing code. 

With our latest release of Skyway Visual Perspectives v. 6.0, Java developers and architects gain the delivery ease, extensibility, and familiarity of working with Eclipse to develop and deploy Web Services and Web Applications in Spring. And because they already are knowledgeable of general software delivery techniques, non-Java developers also will gain these benefits in the near future, too, as we expand the functionality of Skyway Visual Perspectives using the Eclipse and Spring Frameworks. Please read more at www.skywayperspectives.org.

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How to Contact Us

Contact Skyway via email at info@skywaysoftware.com or by phone at +1 813.288.9355.