elixir international^®

The eiWorks™ Platform

In designing the eiWorks™ platform, part of our vision was
"...to build a robust framework for rapidly developing highly reliable applications that developers would choose to use [instead of being required to use] because it dramatically reduces development and testing time and effort..."

Success metric: every system developed on the eiWorks™ platform has been produced on-or-before-time, within-budget, and has exceeded user expectations in terms of covered functionality and ease of use!

The eiWorks™ platform provides a set of common services and benefits to every application using it, including:

• The eiPAM™ (Presentation-Action-Model) engine and toolset to build simple, n-tier, and cloud application components. eiPam™ provides all the requisite “plumbing”, so that developers need focus entirely on application specific logic
• Enterprise-class performance, scalability, extensibility, reliability and management. What this means is that as your business grows, the solution adapts and supports the growth easily and virtually automagically
• User session management (thin-, rich-, cloud-, smart-client applications), complete security model including authentication/authorization and fine-tuned permission management, failure recovery, and more
• Rapid development and prototyping tools including DeMi™ for rapid EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) development and management over various protocols
• Proven yet industry-leading methodology and tools; distilled from years of research and development leveraging both elixir international and industry-wide best practices and expertise

Bottom-line: Optimal balance between leading-edge technology, industry standards, cost, and business needs.

The eiPam™ Engine and Toolset

Human interaction with computer systems continues to remain one of the most challenging aspects of software development even today. In developing a typical business-class application, a large portion of the development time and effort is focused on building "defensive" elements that have little to do with the application logic, such as:

• validating user input for invalid values
• denying access to unauthenticated users
• denying privileges to portions of the application to authenticated users with insufficient authorization to access those areas
• handling error conditions
• and so on

Another area contributing to significant code-bloat is the plumbing of the application's data; moving user input to and from the screen, storing it in a data repository, reading it back from the repository, sending it to other systems, handling all failed cases, and so on. These code constructs are repetitive but require meticulous attention to detail - because these are very prone to oversight and error - on the part of the development and QA teams.

The eiPAM™ engine and toolset dramatically change this devscape by automagically handling the necessary plumbing and freeing up the developers and designers to focus entirely on the application's logic and quality. Leveraging eiPAM™ not only reduces the lines of code required but also the overall development and QA effort, which translates into direct cost savings for you. These savings don't stop at implementation but continue to accrue through maintenance; fewer lines of code = less code to maintain!

Two key eiPAM™ components that deserve special recognition are the Model Object Manager (eiMom™) and the Data Access Director (eiDad™). eiMom™ provides a declarative metaphor for processing user interaction with the system. eiDad™ on the other hand serves as the gateway for the system to communicate transparently with the underlying databases and with other systems. All of the details of the communication process are completely abstracted from the application code. Other features of eiPam™ include:

• Application logging, reporting and monitoring
• Common data management screens, field, form, object, and database validation
• Database connectivity framework to quickly and safely access almost any relational database
• Strict auditing and audit trail maintenance of business transactions and processes
• Personalized user interface "presented" to each user based on individual and role-based permissions
• Seamless integration with other enterprise/organization applications

Electronic Data Interchange

Today, it is rare to find an application that does NOT require a high level of collaboration between systems. These systems can be within a department, across the enterprise or even outside the organization. Each system with its own set of rules for security, communications protocol, data mapping and translation, and so forth, posing different sets of logistical challenges for the application project team and the teams maintaining the external systems.

elixir international has developed a set of components and tools that help make this System-To-System (S2S) interfacing seamless and painless. For instance, the Wizard for generating elixir international Reliable Data Objects (WeiRDO™) is an intelligent XML-based tool that produces lightweight and highly performant components for loading and retrieving data. WeiRDO™ can also be configured to rapidly build and synchronize all database objects and stored procedures required for the interface.

Similarly, the Data Exchange and Management Interface (DeMi™) is an XML-based utility that can be plugged into any S2S equation to provide quick and robust dataportation with native integration to pluggable components such as eiMonitor™ and eiNotification™ to perform periodic health checks and initiate self-healing procedures or notify administrators of configurable exception events.

Methodology: r³

elixir international uses a blend of Agile Software Development and traditional software development methodologies that we call the r³™ Application Development Model; r³™ = rapid, reliable, repeatable. The r³™ (pronounced “our cube”) Model is tightly integrated with our eiWorks™ platform.

It is largely our ability to deploy the r³™ Application Development Model on the eiWorks™ platform that has enabled elixir international to enjoy a consistent history of developing large systems on time and within budget. Of course, it helps that we are extremely result-oriented and employ a single-minded task-force approach to serving our clients in developing or re-platforming their systems. In all of our accomplishments, we have fostered a relationship of trust and partnership with our clients.

While we are aggressive technologists, we are also sensible business people. Our team understands that many projects do not succeed because those responsible for the work lose sight of the true goal of the project - the software solution. Instead, they tend to focus more on the "paperware" and process-for-the-sake-of-process. The elixir international philosophy, on the other hand, is that the point of process should be the deployment and use of the system. We implement only as much process as is needed, no more and no less. In our opinion, the purpose of process is to facilitate software development, not impede it.