XLiRAD Overview
What is XLiRAD?
XLiRAD is an advanced Web Application Server designed to facilitate the design, implementation, and maintenance of web applications that involve data-driven pages, custom functionality, electronic commerce, and multiple technologies. It provides a multitude of server functionality dedicated to facilitating the implementation of traditionally difficult web solutions. XLiRAD comes bundled with two thin-client applications designed to assist the web developer in creating high performance, data-driven web pages easily without having to focus on underlying technologies such as databases. The web development team using XLiRAD is only required to have a basic understanding of two standard skills: SQL and HTML. XLiRAD HTML pages (hence referred to as Templates) integrate with all other known web technologies seemlessly and can be used to provide data for those technologies or to process data resulting from their executions. The XLiRAD Application Server and Client Tools are designed around the concept of remote team development but can just as easily be used by a single, in house developer. XLiRAD's modular design is specifically setup to adapt to new web technologies as they become available and integrate their use into future revisions. XLiRAD is a completely cross-platform product that can run on any computer with a JAVA 2 Virtual Machine installed. XLiRAD integrates with the existent webserver through the use of servlets. The installed servlet manager must also be JAVA 2 compliant.
Testing of the EJB server needs to be completed before being fully supported. HHPN has incorporated JBoss into DBServer. Most of the JBoss EJB documentation is applicable. JBoss documentation can be found at JBoss
Feature List
1. Database Connection Pooling
By pooling the connections, system resources are conserved and connection overhead is avoided. Web clients receive connections on an as needed, first come first serve basis. XLiRAD customers can buy exactly the number of connections necessary for the traffic levels associated with their sites and can upgrade quickly and easily at any time as traffic increases.
2. Group and User Management
XLiRAD is designed to fit the project model that matches standard corporate and ASP development. XLiRAD administrators create groups that represent projects and assign password protected users to each group. Database resources are protected on a group basis and can be shared amongst numerous groups or isolated to a single group. Only developers assigned to a particular group can view/edit web applications created through that group.
3. Administrative Emails
By setting up the XLiRAD administrator's email address, the server will notify the administrator when network and database errors occur.
4. Source Code Control
XLiRAD templates are managed through a checkin, checkout system to prevent concurrent editing. Users are required to provide comments to describe changes made to a template at checkin time. All old revisions are stored with comments, usernames, and datestamps, and can be viewed or activated easily by the developers.
5. Remote Team Development
XLiRAD developers, through the provided client tools, can be located on site, or anywhere throughout the world. This allows developers to work from home when applicable or contractors to work remotely. This opens the potential labor pool for employers to non-local areas. The ASP provider through intelligent group assignment can easily setup numerous business clients to work on their sites remotely without any cross-over with other clients running on the same server.
6. Chat Server
To facilitate remote team development, XLiRAD provides a chat server that can be turned on to allow remote developers to communicate freely and securely. The chat server separates messaging by group to maintain the privacy and isolation of the group development process.
7. Automated Templates
XLiRAD allows the administrator to schedule any XLiRAD templates for automated, regular execution. This allows the XLiRAD developers to create maintenance templates that provide services such as cleaning up the database, emailing, service checking, etc.
8. XLiRAD Server Arrays
XLiRAD Application Servers all contain registries to store information about sister servers that can exist in clusters. These arrays can be used to replicate data across databases and share development between the servers.
9. Replication
XLiRAD Clusters can pass data to each other in realtime to maintain synchronization of data between remote databases. This allows the administrator to share the load of web traffic amongst numerous webservers, XLiRAD Servers, and databases.
10. Group Transfer
XLiRAD Servers can pass entire groups of development to each other at the the administrator's discretion. In practical application, this process facilitates the standard web development practice of moving completed, tested web applications from development boxes to live boxes.
11. Scheduled Backups
XLiRAD Servers perform an automatic daily backup of all work to a datestamped backup directory. The administrator can setup the time for the backup to coincide with times of minimal traffic to their websites.
12. Statistical Tracking
XLiRAD Servers register all template and SQL Statement calls to a log file in the common log format and provides tools for viewing activity. By using the common log format, administrators can also view advanced statistical analysis of XLiRAD usage with their favorite log analyzer tools.
13. Custom Extensions
XLiRAD servers provide a development environment to add custom code to the base functionality of the server. The custom functionality, written in JAVA, can be called from XLiRAD templates to perform extra duties such as credit card billing, messaging, emailing, native method calls, cookies, etc. XLiRAD provides an import tool for JAVA Beans and JAR files and introspection assistance to the coding process for JAVA Beans.
14. SQL Tools
The XLiRAD client tool, SQLEditor, provides numerous functionality for managing sql statements. SQLEditor includes a query wizard for quickly creating insert, update, select, and delete statements. SQLEditor provides a database introspection tool for viewing the schema of the database in order to facilitate sql statement crafting and editing. The SQLEditor shows in a simple tabular form all of the sql statements created by users in a particular group for easy optimization by database administrators.
15. Template Tools
The XLiRAD client tool, TemplateMaker, provides a multiple document interface for editing XLiRAD templates. TemplateMaker includes numerous tag wizards and forms for creating templates quickly and easily. TemplateMaker automatically performs template checkin and checkout where appropriate. HTML pages created with other tools can be opened as local documents with TemplateMaker and edited normally to add database interactivity and other server functionality. These templates can then be saved on the server for instant access from the web.
16. Security
All XLiRAD client requests are encrypted to provided maximum security for remote development outside of firewalls.
17. Auto Deployment
Because all work resides on the XLiRAD server, saved changes are automatically updated at the time of the save and immediately available for web requests. No ftping of files is required. To provide adequate testing for new development, we recommend the development box-live box network setup. The clients should all work on the development box with its own webserver/XLiRAD Server and can test their work through their web browsers on the development box. After adequate testing, use the Group Transfer function to move the corpus of development to the live box in one quick motion. This would update the live box immediately with all changed work and make it avaliable for requests.
18. Integration
XLiRAD Templates enhance the functionality of othe web technologies. XLiRAD templates can be used to dynamically provide the arguments for any web objects including applets, COM objects, etc.
19. Data Validation
XLiRAD SQL Statements perform all data validation server side based upon the data types specified by the statement creator. This allows the template developer to avoid all of the cumbersome JavaScript typically used to perform this feature. Invalid data types entered by the web request will throw back errors for processing by the template developer.
20. Advanced Error Handling
XLiRAD allows the developer to determine the course of action in response to processing errors that occur as a result of web requests. Errors can be displayed, ignored, redirected to error processing templates, invoke conditional error logic, etc. This allows the template designer to custom handle the different types of errors that occur during web transactions whether they be server-side processing errors or user-input errors.
21. Wireless Support
XLiRAD development tools completely support the WML command set. You can create and deploy WML templates as easily as HTML templates.
22. XML Support
XLiRAD can convert any request from the Database to XML. From there you can send to it to whoever needs it. Or embed the XML into your HTML page for transformation with XSLT.
23. XSLT Transformations
XLiRAD supports XSLT transformations. So you can generate your DB requests into XML and then transform the XML with XSLT technology. The XML can also be imported from external sources via Extended Functions
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