Application of the Eclipse rich Ajax development platform in CAS Software AG project

Brief introduction

CAS Software AG is a software company from Karlsruhe, Germany, founded in 1986. The company focuses on CRM (Customer relationship Management), especially in SME (SME) areas. In recent years, the software products of CAS software have gained a very good reputation in the field of CRM, including their CRM products in specific fields such as education, automatic proxy and membership based organizations or associations.

Recently, CAS software is developing a product called CAs PIA (Personal Information Assistant) that is released as SaaS (software as a service), the first product to be released in this way. This product uses a lot of technology, we will give a detailed description in the future. The focus of this case study will be on Eclipse RAP (Rich Ajax platform) and how it is applied to the CAS PIA schema. It also involves some interesting applications of RAP, some lessons learned by CAs in the process of using it, and the future direction of their products.

Range

CAS Software AG develops CRM (Customer relationship Management) software for freelancers as well as SMEs. For CAs, they target software audiences to users who do not use specific CRM applications but are more likely to use combinations of tools and applications to track their customers, markets, and so on. CAS believes there will be a large market demand for customer information management software that can be centralized and accessible. There are already desktop based applications in specific industries, but these applications only provide functionality that is limited to CRM proprietary. By using technologies such as Eclipse Rap and Eclipse Equinox, CAS PIAs can develop not only "standard" CRM functions, but also applications that manage marketing strategies, e-mail consolidation, and personalized letters, And all of this is put into a clean, modular package.

Using the Eclipse Rap,cas PIA in User interface development provides an interface experience that uses a very user-friendly desktop style. The user interface is developed on the basis of ergonomics (ergonomics), using familiar forms widgets and behaviors, such as drag-and-drop, and many of the things users expect from Web applications. In addition, online functionality enables all colleagues within the same company to manage delegates, tasks, and documents through the application, as well as other important workflows such as address translation and path planning. In the next chapter, we'll delve into the development architecture of CAS PIA to see how open source software plays a vital role.

Solution Overview

CRM solutions have been around for years, both desktops and online, and have become very powerful in recent times. Users expect to use them far beyond basic functionality such as reports, security, affinity appearance and experience, and a responsive user interface. Based on the expectations and requirements of many users for CRM applications, CAS chooses open source software as the basis for their entire solution.

From a design perspective, CAS PIA is an extensible Web application that leverages multiple service processes that can share access pressures and provide redundancy. Each service process runs on top of Apache Tomcat as an application server, including a rap based application layer and a service core. The application tier is responsible for presenting the user interface and processing user requests, while the service core provides business logic and database access.

CAS uses web-based applications so that users do not have to worry about installation, hardware costs and configuration, and data security. Also, web-based applications enable users to access the CAS PIA anywhere, without having to install the heavy client on each machine. The presentation layer as the front end of the Web application is developed using Eclipse rap. The RAP project homepage describes it as a framework that provides developers with the following functionality:

Build rich Web applications based on AJAX technology using the Eclipse development model, Plug-ins based on Eclipse Workbench Extension points, and component toolkits developed using the SWT API (and JFace) .... Rap is much like Eclipse RCP, but it's not started on a desktop computer, it's running on a server and can be accessed by a standard browser. This is mainly because it provides a set of specially implemented SWT (a subset of an SWT API). (http://www.eclipse.org/rap/about.php)

The following is a simple architectural contrast diagram of Eclipse RCP and Eclipse rap.