Kbase P60727: Dynamics Why to Use Dynamics?
| Autor |
Progress Software Corporation - Progress |
| Acesso |
Público |
| Publicação |
26/12/2003 |
|
Status: Unverified
GOAL:
Dynamics Why to Use Dynamics?
FACT(s) (Environment):
Dynamics 2.1A
FIX:
Dynamics is a repository based development environment with a generated user interface built at runtime from information defined in the repository. Whilst the interface is not as flexible as coding it yourself in the 4GL, it is certainly very extensible. If you are prepared to put in some additional effort upfront to define what look and feel you wish to have for your application then you can pretty much make it look however you want, and then it helps enforce consistency throughout your development project - by only using your specific custom templates.
It is true that in earlier versions of Dynamics there were many more restrictions, but V2.1 introduced dynamic frames which added a significant amount of flexibility to the UI. The latest version also supports shared toolbars across multiple pages and has significant improvements for dynamic treeview support.
The repository facilitates moving to other UI's, e.g. WEB. I am also aware of a customer who has built a VB rendering engine onto Dynamics for example. Dynamics does not limit you at all when it comes to other UI's, as additional attributes can be defined at the class level to support extended functionality in other UI's, and the other rendering engines can simply ignore properties they do not understand. You are not therefore limited by the lowest common denominator.
In terms of Dynamics and SOA - these are not mutually exclusive as suggested. It is certainly true that Dynamics today is very UI centric and does not yet help much in the area of business logic, but it also does not prevent you from adopting SOA! Going forward you will see a lot more assistance from Dynamics as an integrated part of OpenEdge Studio in helping you to build an SOA.
Dynamics V2.1 is the latest release and resolves many stability issues and significantly improves the performance. Many customers are successfully using Dynamics today and a number are in the process of migrating to V2.1. As far as WAN performance is concerned, a future version of Progress (possibly 9.1D08 and certainly 10.0A) will introduce compression for the Appserver to reduce the network data significantly.
If you do wish to deploy on a WAN, you should certainly consider the complexity of the UI for screens to be run via the WAN and be sure to minimize network traffic as much as possible.
Due to major structural changes to address performance issues, customers who have customized some parts of the framework could experience difficulties migrating to V2.1 due to changed behavior requiring the customizations be revisited. If you run into difficulties, I suggest contacting tech support for assistance as per the normal official channels. I also suggest reading the whitepaper up on PSDN that details some of the changes we made - http://psdn.progress.com/library/whitepapers/dynamics/docs/pd_performancewp.pdf
To help resolve performance issues, V2.1 relies on the integrity of the data in the repository. We have found that due to tools issues in previous releases (fixed in V2.1), this is also causing some people issues when they are trying to migrate to V2.1. We are working closely with the customers and tech support to address this. Again, if you are running into issues, I suggest contacting tech support for assistance.
Finally, a lot of community discussion in relation to Dynamics development goes on via the POSSE email list - dev@dynamics.possenet.org so if you are interested in Dynamics I would recommend subscribing to that email list also. You can do that from http://dynamics.possenet.org/servlets/ProjectMailingListList