Because the Decisions Platform is targeted at rule and process intensive business applications - and has a full set of business focused design technologies that all our customers applications to be customized and tuned without writing code - the user experience of being able to be fully interactive while doing complex tasks was very important to us. The choice to build the foundation of our presentation layer using XAML [Silverlight] provides us the capability to have desktop like applications (full drag and drop, snappy ui’s, etc) in a full cross platform, multi browser environment.
Oh - we also have an HTML and mobile portal for applications that need them - however, having built on silverlight allows us to have a cross platform user interface that allows us to do things that are not possible in many other technologies.
Silverlight enables us to have a ‘desktop application’ like experience - with no client installation. This is critical to support our designers, but also enables our customers applications to have a high degree of interaction and speed that is not easy using other technologies. The user experiences in the portal are able to be designed in our page designer and new elements and pages can be added by developers.
Once the portal is loaded, all of the presentation is managed on the client and the data and logic is executed on the server through a WCF service infrastructure. This offloads processing from the server and enables really fast and interactive user experiences since once an page is loaded, it is not fetched from server again - it is managed locally (like a more traditional desktop application).
We are going to talk about some of the more interesting features and designers in upcoming articles, so, I put in a few basic ones to allow you to peek at it - however, if you want to play with it, just signup HERE. You can download the installer to test in your environment or you can use it from one of our cloud servers. Isn't workflow automation wonderful?
Carl [Chief Architect]
