Scriptics Connect Author
Makes development as easy as using Post-it ® Notes!
Scriptics Connect Author is a graphical development tool that you use to
create document handlers, which define how XML documents are processed
by Scriptics Connect Server. Its powerful user interface hides the
complexity of XML programming so well that it can be used by business
analysts as well as professional programmers.
Intuitive and simple graphical interface. Most XML tools force you
to write complex low-level code using Document Object Model (DOM)
APIs. With Scriptics Connect Author, you simply drag and drop from a
graphical view of an XML document. By hiding the details of XML
document management, Scriptics Connect allows you to focus on what's
really important: your business processes.
Wizards speed development. Wizards allow developers to specify common
operations graphically, without programming. For example, inserting
data into a database can occur without writing one line of code.
The wizard for database inserts allows you to browse the database and select
the tables and columns that you wish to populate. Then you indicate
what XML data to insert by dragging and dropping from a graphical
view of the XML document. And that's it. No XML parsing. No DOM
tree-walking. No SQL. No programming at all. Just point and click.
Scriptics Connect Author ships with a number of built-in wizards and more will
be added in the future.
Define your own wizards. A powerful Scriptics Connect feature is a set of
APIs that you can use to create new wizards for common actions in your
business, such as interfacing to a particular application. Once the
wizard is defined, developers can use the wizard to speed up development
and reduce programming.
Scriptics Connect Author uses a model much like Post-it ® Notes. If you needed
to explain to a person how to handle a paper form such as a purchase
order, a simple way to do this would be to take an example of the form
and place Post-it ® Notes on the form with instructions how to process
the key fields. For example, a Post-it ® next to the customer's name
might indicate that the customer should be entered into a customer
tracking database. Another Post-it ® in the "Parts" section of the
purchase order might indicate that for each part, the part number and
quantity should be entered into an order fulfillment system, and so on.
A person could take this marked-up form and use it to process incoming
forms by matching the Post-it ® Notes on the marked-up form against the actual
fields of the incoming form.
Scriptics Connect uses a similar model for XML documents. You mark up a
prototype XML document with instructions for how to process the key
elements. This set of instructions is a document handler. Later on,
when an XML document is posted to the handler's URL, Scriptics Connect
Server scans the elements of the incoming document and invokes all
of the corresponding instructions from the document handler.
(See sample screen.)
Scriptics Connect Author displays for you a graphical view of an XML
document that shows the various elements and their sub-elements.
Scriptics Connect Author creates this view from a Document Type Description
(DTD) that you supply. You navigate through the view to select
elements that require processing. Then for each of these elements
you specify the action to take when the element occurs in an
incoming XML document.
Scriptics Connect Author defines several different kinds of actions. Each
type of action has its own wizard that provides a graphical interface
for specifying the action. The most general and powerful action
is a Tcl script: you can write arbitrary Tcl code that will be
invoked for each occurrence of the associated XML element.
However, the wizards allow many common actions to be specified
without programming. For example, the wizard for Oracle database
inserts allows you to browse a database to select a table. Then
you drag and drop from the XML document view to indicate which
elements of the XML document should be stored into which fields
of the database.
Scriptics Connect Author provides a simple set of APIs that you can use
to define your own wizards. Scriptics will work with third-party
developers, system integrators, and end-users to encourage the
development of a large set of wizards that provide simple
implementations of many common business rules. This pool of
wizards will provide a significant competitive advantage to any
developer working with Scriptics Connect.
