Wishing you a successful and happy new year 2010

Its the last working day of the first decade of the new millennium. We are extremely happy to have the opportunity to work with many exciting customers, partners, bloggers, friends and participate actively in the Cloud computing ecosystem.

We also deeply appreciate the support, patience & opportunity extended to us during 2009 and please be assured -- we hold lots of goodies for all our customers. As a PaaS provider we will continue to create greater Cloud awareness, innovate actively and bring better services to serve you better with continuous commitment and reliability for the coming year and beyond.

From all of us at WOLF Frameworks PaaS, a very Happy New Year - 2010!


Best Regards,

WOLF Platform-as-a-Service Team

Cloud Computing: Changing the face of collaboration

The fact that Cloud Computing and specifically Situational Application PaaS are changing the face of collaboration for businesses is something that we've all heard about. But here's a short anecdote which demonstrates how small or local businesses are actually transforming and benefiting from the WOLF Cloud Computing Framework.

Recently, one of our existing NPO customers received a substantial donation for a rural development project. Normally this means a chain reaction involving several days of manual data collection, data consolidation in databases & spreadsheets and finally analysis culminating into a large report. The report would subsequently be printed and mailed by registered post to the donor sitting in another part of the planet.

While this is a standard, thanks to Wolf, our customer only deployed field staff to collect data using a Wolf-based form running asynchronously in their hand-held devices. The team designed a small mashup application which could import this data, match it with their past records from other databases & spreadsheets in their existing application and also generate the required analytics.

It only took two working days and the entire data was consolidated without using a single paper record while the relevant reports/dashboard analytics were available with a single click without any manual intervention.

Creating a login for the donor and sending him an email with details to view these reports was all that is took from the administration department. Two and a half days from demand to supply.

The global reach offered by online software services and SaaS platforms like WOLF enabled the donor to instantly access the resource reports and arrange a fund transfer to the NPO. An acknowledgment was generated instantly by the NPO and sent back to the donor within minutes! All this using only a web browser and internet connection!

We are happy to practically see the changing nature of collaboration offered by our applications to customers.

Maybe SaaS should stand for Smile as a Service too :-)

Growing Usage of SaaS-based Accounting Systems by Indian SMBs

There has been a lot of discussion around SaaS adoption in India. Let’s bring into context the Indian Market for SaaS-based Accounting software to clear the air a bit…

A recent study by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners Inc. reveals that Indian SMBs (small and medium businesses) will spend US$30 million on accounting software in 2009, showing a 5% growth over 2008. Read more about the study here.

On-demand SaaS is a growing trend in the accounting software market and Indian SMBs are choosing this option to weather the economic storm. Features like rapid implementation, low capital expenditure, and web support are making these SaaS-based software solutions popular within the SMBs.

eCounting, one of the accounting products built on WOLF Platform-as-a-Service is an emerging player in the Indian Accounting SaaS world.

There is a lot of additional functionality that can be provided along with an accounting software like supply chain management, logistics, financial & inventory management, etc. In the near future, we look forward to working with different domain experts belonging to Accounting and peripheral domains to try and cater to the needs of the market with more such interesting applications...

Best Regards,
Ankit Jain
Account Executive
WOLF Frameworks

Is this Agile Development?

Yesterday, I visited a prospective partner to introduce WOLF and explore possible synergies. While the first part of the meeting revolved around showcasing the platform, aligning business models and getting to know the type of applications they were planning to build, etc – what followed after was a lot more interesting…

The prospect started highlighting features for one of his web applications, describing analytics of his data & business processes and one of us started designing the application simultaneously on the fly. Btw, the office had a superb Wi-Fi network.

By the time he decided to end his requirement definition, we were ready with a working proof of concept for the application itself. We gave him a unique URL over which he could access the application - ready to use. Talking of agility and rapid application development, that is what we can deliver, quite agile I think …???

Wolf Frameworks PaaS awes the Indian CIO community at Nasscom Product Conclave 2009

Dear Friends,

We are proud to announce our participation in the Nasscom Product Conclave 2009.


Links: Event Details and Key Speakers

Our participation involved a showcasing/demonstration of the Platform by CEO, Sunny Ghosh, on day 2 of the event to the esteemed CIO panel and an enthusiastic audience.

A lightening fast 6-minute presentation was followed by a Q&A session that touched on Wolf's technology, how we prevent lock-in and our partner ecosystem.

Round-the- clock tweets on the event meant that you could catch the coverage and action live on Twitter.

We are thrilled to be a part of the 3rd successful edition of the Nasscom Product Conclave - the "Mecca of Indian Product and High Technology Companies". Many thanks to the Nasscom team for the meticulous arrangements & look forward to being a part of this event again next year.

Best Regards,

Aditya
Wolf Frameworks Team

Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Use Wolf Platform-as-a-Service to deliver your next SaaS Application

Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Use Wolf Platform-as-a-Service to deliver your next SaaS Application?

View more presentations from CloudComputing.

WOLF PaaS supports true Agile Development & implementation methodologies

While working with a new solution partner who has come on-board, I have made the following observations:

IT Solution Partners have traditionally provisioned for limited customer feedback or changes or in other words provisioned for ‘limited iteration’ when it comes to customer project definition & execution phases. While the Agile methodology of developing projects was a major improvement – most software development life cycle methodologies mandates the solution provider to get as close as he can to the customers requirement (Functionality, User Experience, Technology & Delivery) and lock him into a scoping document.

Present day software requirement for customers are very dynamic, especially for the SMBs and start-ups. Customers want their software applications to scale with their business. They would not be very comfortable to define the scope of the entire project in the starting of software design phase as this is a function of how the business grows. At the same time he would like to be rest assured by the service provider that he should not get constrained in the future, by his present infrastructure and software stack in use or design decisions taken now.

Such dynamic software requirements are suited for agile development methodology in its true sense. Agile methods break tasks into small increments with minimal planning, and don’t directly involve long-term scoping. However, to be able to move towards Agile Methodology, IT service providers need to have quite a few things sorted out. There are some key limitations introduced by current infrastructure-software-hardware, etc. that they have to look into. Consider the following 4 scenarios from the application and delivery side of things -

1. How tough and complex can it get to change your basic software design to accommodate additional data elements while you are in the development phase? Ask anyone who has been developing business applications and the answer could very well be: Ooh NO!

2. Can we change or add another validation business process without touching the Database code or User Interface? This is a BIG no!

3. We have gathered additional funding and want our web solution to deliver the same application logic over another channel such as the mobile or SMS. Can we reuse our old mobile UI code and plug the new business logic? No problem, I have to figure out the API’s and this will take time.

4. We would like to setup staging, development environment in our in house servers and multiple deployment environments for higher bandwidth and lower latency for our customers. I am sure; you have provisioned & designed our web application architecture for such deployment & scalable scenarios?

Vision and changes are key elements of success. Customers will demand multifold flexibility as they build systems around every business process and these demands for an every evolving architecture. Shifting to offering solutions in SaaS form built on evolving, adaptive and changing platforms like WOLF empowers IT Service providers to be able to address most of these scenarios effectively.

The infrastructure is being completely taken care by the PaaS providers. Based on their solution requirements the server, database etc. can be chosen without any upfront capital investments. They automate processes from workflows, process diagrams, reports etc. and there is no necessity of programming as well. This makes application development rapid and empowers the IT implementation companies to be agile in its true sense and develop a long lasting relationship with their clients…

Wolf PaaS presents @ IET International Cloud Computing Conference 2009

Dear Friends,

The last couple of days have been an exciting time for Wolf during which our minds were literally in the Clouds. We were proud participants and presenters in the IET Cloud Computing international conference held at Bangalore on 15-16th September, 2009.


The Institution of Engineering and Technology(IET) is one of the world’s leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community. It has has more than 150,000 members in 127 countries and offices in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. The IET provides a global knowledge network to facilitate the exchange of ideas and promote the positive role of science, engineering and technology in the world. The IET website: http://www.theiet.org/

The conference was targeted towards the Cloud Computing ecosystem and the end user organizations interested in how to:

• Deliver solutions for best practice the management of cloud computing use
  
  
• Share innovation, breakthroughs and developments in cloud computing implementation into the organisation
  
  
• Report on the latest case-study findings for cloud computing for end-user strategy and business application
  
  
• Ensure the most up-to-date and cost effective legal, business and global fiscal strategy to demonstrate its advantage
  
  
• Bring internationals and local based SME industry minds for maximised networking opportunity and industry learning

Wolf conducted two master class sessions on day 2 (September 16th) of the conference. Wolf CEO Sunny Ghosh, had an outstanding presentation on "Building affordable SaaS solutions in the Cloud" with a flavor targeted towards SMBs , followed by a Live "SaaS Application Development Exercise" by our Founder Ralph Vaz.

We were proud to be a part of this initiative and many thanks to the IET team for an amazing idea to make great minds meet and sort out the cloud around the "Cloud" .

Connect @ WOLF Frameworks Forum

Dear Customers & Partners,

In our continuing efforts to make WOLF Frameworks a lucrative platform for our partners/customers & to provide an additional communication & engagement channel for our community at large, we released the first version of the WOLF Frameworks Forum today.

The forum marks the beginning of our official attempt towards building & nurturing an online community which will soon have access to a lot more product information, online help, customer cases, feature releases, tips & tricks with the ability to collaborate with potential prospects, customers, other partners along with our own internal R & D and Development team members.

Keeping up with tradition, the WOLF Forum is also a WOLF based SaaS application – designed and delivered rapidly using the WOLF Frameworks Technology. We intend to open up and offer many such web widgets to our partners – who can then offer the same to their customers.

You can reach the Forum via the website http://www.wolfframeworks.com or using the direct URL: http://connect.wolfframeworks.com/ In any case, you are only required to have a signed in status with the WOLF PaaS Service to actively contribute. Your existing WOLF Account (User name and password) will work without any changes.

I would like to personally take this opportunity to invite you to join, participate & contribute in the Forum. Please do send us your comments, suggestions and ideas to improve the forum functionality further.

Happy connecting, best regards,

Sunny Ghosh
Director & CEO
Wolf Platform-as-a-Service

What do you get against the monthly recurring fee from your Platform-as-a-Service vendor?

Cloud Computing and particularly Platform-as-a-Service should work almost like any other essential service. True PaaS environments will work like any of your utility services and also provide additional cover protecting your business data/processes & applications. Somewhat like obtaining a service and getting insurance cover as well...

Consider the following scenario: WOLF delivers the complete software infrastructure which includes Database Layer + Middleware Layer and the Application Layer along with Infrastructure + storage + automated maintenance & feature upgrades. Customers have access to this integrated environment (24/7/365) which makes it easy for them to quickly use, develop, diagnose & deliver effective solutions which takes care of their business challenges & needs.

So while it seems like a PaaS provider only gets you access – software – storage & maybe trained support team members – a true PaaS comes along with certain de-facto standard offerings, such as a great Service Level Assurance (SLA), explicit insurance from any loss of data for your SaaS applications, disaster recovery procedures to restore applications & even custom performance/scalability benchmarks if required.

Now contrast the above with a phone, electricity or a Governmental Medical & Health Care Service and you might not find some of these as new dimensions of service. Wondering what does that entail PaaS provider such as WOLF Frameworks to undertake?

Well, lots I must say. A very complex set of routine runs which takes care of data backups in multiple locations, higher infrastructure cost, complex version control mechanism, high physical security with NO access to data, built-in features within WOLF application Designer for customers to access-extract & take periodic data backups themselves in Relational Database Formats in their own preferred location, ability to extract SaaS application Design in portable XML format and also to run Database Server in a different private server, etc.

While all of these are efforts to minimize risk for customer’s data loss, high service availability standards, well trained staff for support, etc -- We consider them in hindsight as the basic Insurance which customers require before they start building applications using our platform as a service.

What’s your opinion on PaaS Services vs. other Utility Services-Insurance covers? Does the service analogy resonate well with your thought? What kind of service level standards you expect your PaaS provider to deliver. I am interested in your take, thought & feedback...

Sunny Ghosh
Director & CEO
Wolf Platform-as-a-Service

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

New Features & Enhancements in Business Rule Actions

Based on customer & partner feedback, the following enhancements have been made 'LIVE' in the Business Rule Actions:

1. If-Then-Else Actions

Location: Business Rules

Problem: The absence of an Else node in the If-Then Action of the Business Rules. This required the use of multiple If-Then actions to specify conditions or constraints in your Application.

Solution: The If-Then Action has been updated with an Else node as shown in the image below:


All your previously added If-Then Actions have already been updated. Remember that it is perfectly fine to leave the contents of the Else block empty.

2. Formatting emails via Business Rules

Location: Business Rules

Problem:

When creating HTML formatted emails in Business Rules, the font style had to be specified individually for all the text of the email. There was a need to specify a default font style for the entire email.

Solution:

The Send Email Action is now equipped with a feature that allows you to specify a default font style to all the text in an email. See the snapshot below :


The font style specified in the "Mail Default Style" node will be used in the entire email.

Thanks for the feedback and stay tuned for some exciting new features in the coming days. We are being showered with new features, cheers to the 'Development Team' :)

Announcing the Wolf Frameworks Webinar Series

Welcome to the Wolf Webinar Series. Come and learn what the Wolf Platform as a Service can do for you?

We are very pleased to announce that we will be hosting weekly webinars to showcase our platform and show how you can rapidly Design, Develop and Deploy highly customised - tailor made rich web applications for your customers in the Cloud; at a fraction of the cost and in no time.

The next webinar is scheduled for 17th of July 2009 (12pm EST, 5.00pm GMT, 9.30pm IST). You can register for this webinar at http://www.wolfframeworks.com/webinar.asp

On the Webinar we will talk about

• What is a Platform as a Service (PaaS), how and who does it help?
• Introduction to Wolf Platform-as-a-Service (Wolf PaaS)
• How different is Wolf Frameworks PaaS?
• Target users for Platform-as-a-Service and how are they empowered?
• How the Wolf PaaS sets your business free from any Data or Business IP lock-in
• Live Demonstration: Building an ‘Employee Management’ SaaS application in 15 minutes using Wolf PaaS.

Looking forward to seeing you all on the Webinar.

Wolf Platform-as-a-Service

Quick checklists as you scale your Business with OnDemand software services…

A lot of new customers & our partners are beginning to leverage WOLF Platform and add additional recurring revenue streams to their existing business model or simply launching new viable OnDemand services for their own customers and/or automating their own business processes via hosted SaaS applications.

Surprisingly not many of them are introducing completely new ways of doing things as we saw during our Dotcom days, but focusing around delivering existing services in a better-well planned-efficiently designed business process model with higher value to customers.

If you are wondering: What is so different about these OnDemand Business Models, here are a few important points to consider, before you start out with your own OnDemand SaaS Service.

1. OnDemand SaaS Business Viability Check 1, CaPex Vs. OpEx: If you were building a service apartment and planned to break even via just renting rooms within a year’s time that would be a bit too ambitious. Simply because of the investments (Primarily “Land + Construction”, followed by branding, marketing, sales, service, maintenance staff, etc) will not justify your rental rates? But if someone could provide you with the land and develop the building for you - you could start renting it out and pay a cut from your rentals to the ‘Building Developer’. That might start to work if you have a well automated business process, isn't it?
This is a key differentiator of OnDemand Business model, you don't want to have a lot of Capital Expenditure and you should keep your Operative Expenses directly proportinate to your business growth ....hmmm…

2. OnDemand SaaS Business Viability Check 2, Unique / Scalable Offering with new Customer Base: How good would ‘Aurora Borealis’ be - if it did not have viewers to appreciate its lovely beauty? Releasing a good looking Service Apartment, with a lovely music lounge and free summer coolers at your service & limited customers does NOT make the business bells ding. What if the hotel had everything great and also offered rooms for airport transfer passengers at $ 50/- per 5 hrs stay – beating all the competitions hands down? That might attract a lot of stranded customers with no option today. Like any other business, OnDemand SaaS Businesses require a unique offering which can be distinguished from others and can attract new customers & can be scaled. Don't forget scale...

3. OnDemand Business Viability Check 3, Follow your own teachings, productize your own Business: Someone taught me many years back that the first customer is good, second customer is better and when the third one arrives it becomes a business. That’s not all. If your business manages to get the 5th and 10th customer without you being personally involved in a shorter period of time, it becomes the most viable business of all. Most online services are designed to serve many with reduced time and cost. Business Process optimization and automation is the key along with the right set of people, technology & vision. Having the service apartment to get their first three customers might get you to sales, but how do you intend to get the next set of airport passengers signed up for your transit room service? Do you have a process & a partnering plan? Hmmm…

4. OnDemand SaaS Business Viability Check 4, Find your beachhead, choose your partner, cost containment & sustenance: Whether you are funded or not, you are in deep trouble if you have not sorted out your cash . That's the king! You are probably better off renting a bungalow and launching your service apartment & keeping the business going before getting your own apartment constructed. This is where we and our partner ecosystem come in handy. WOLF gets you the infrastructure, software platform, database, application scoping & designing service, hosting, stringent SLA & even excellent SaaS business model product consultants who guides you all the way, sets you free to focus on your customers and takes your mundane processes out. Having the existance sorted is probably the most important thing a ‘Business’ must do for its own life. Remember, Innovation and Efficiency -- two sides of the same coin which every business must perform. Hmmm...

5. OnDemand SaaS Business Viability Check 5, Play your own game, be opinionated about your own vision: Making OnDemand business successful is not going to be any different and it requires deep domain knowledge. The IT bit of the business is really small, and I really mean it. Look at WOLF, how better-faster-cheaper can it get than this to get your own software applications running. Finding the purpose and making the means meet will require you to develop your own practice-business-methodology which will need strategy-tactics-operational & financial efficiency and more importantly a great partnering strategy. Your best bet is your own knowledge and a great team. No SaaS Platform can alone make you successful :(

I am happy to share more and hope this one serves as a quick Checklist on how better to launch & succeed with your OnDemand Business Models. Until then, Cheers,

Sunny Ghosh
Director & CEO
Wolf Platform-as-a-Service

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Pictorially represent your SaaS Application data

This month we've focused our efforts on assisting our Customers/Partners to visually represent their business data in charts, graphs, etc. using the recently launched Wolf Chart Control.

Based on the positive feedback, we've introduced a new feature that allows you to pictorially represent your data in a Search Screen. And believe it or not this can be done with just a simple set of mouse clicks. NO CODING! :-)

This concept which we call as an "Image Map" links the data of a Search Screen column to an image source and displays custom images instead of standard text, based on the column values.

Confused? An example will help you picture this:
Let's say I have a simple vehicle inventory managing system which keeps track of all my vehicles and additionally allows me to assign a rating to each vehicle. The Search Screen appears as shown below:











The vehicle ratings(column marked in RED in the picture above) are based on the following:
1- Excellent
2- Good
3- Average

Using the "Image Map" concept, I can associate the vehicle ratings to different flag colors as follows:
1 (Excellent) : Red flag
2 (Good): Yellow flag
3 (Average): Green flag

(Hint: In the Designer, go to the Search Screen and create an image map that associates the vehicle ratings to images of different flag colors. Link this image map to the "Vehicle Rating" column of the Search Screen)

The same Search Screen using an Image map for the "Vehicle Rating" column is as shown below:











You can also edit the image map at any time to change the images associated with the vehicle ratings.

Go ahead and spice up your Wolf SaaS application using the power of visual analytics in Wolf!

Need help in using image maps? Some feature you would like to see in your Wolf SaaS Application? Feel free to get in touch.

Wolf Platform-as-a-Service delivers smart visual charts for your SaaS applications

Hi friends,

We have released a chart control which supports Google Charts API’s. As we all know, Charts can be used to represent large quantities of data and the relationships between parts of the data. To bring this functionality to our users, we have come up with the Wolf Chart Control, which is a point-and-click interface that helps you to visually represent the data of your Wolf SaaS Application.

“Charts have been the most requested feature from our existing customers and we are happy to release the functionality. We see a growing demand for Business-Analytics-as-a-Service and will now be able to help our customers in developing visually rich SaaS application rapidly using our new charting control and advanced technical code free Business Rules Engine" said Mr. Ralph Vaz, Founder & CTO WOLF Frameworks.

What kind of Charts can be build using Wolf Chart Designer?

Visualization of Data adds a new degree of usability and understanding to the users using your wolf Application. To list the types of chart, which can be built using Wolf Chart control, will add a new excitement to you:

1. Line Chart
2. Horizontal Bar Chart with Multiple bars
3. Horizontal Bar Chart with Stacked bars
4. Vertical Bar Chart with Multiple bars
5. Vertical Bar Chart with Stacked bars
6. Simple Pie Chart
7. 3D pie Chart
8. Radar Chart
9. Go meter (google-o-meter)

Wolf Development Team is working to add more to this list, which means more options to represent your data.

What if I had made a line chart with Wolf Chart control and want to change it to other type of chart?

Just select the type of chart again in the chart control, and publish. A new type of chart with same statistics is ready in one click.

How much time does it take to configure a chart using Wolf Chart Control?

Not more than 5 minutes…or till your coffee lasts!!

What is the core process working behind the Wolf Chart Generation?

Wolf Business Rule Engine and Google Chart API's are the backbone and core processes behind the chart generation. So the robustness of the chart is unquestionable.

In the background, how does the Wolf Chart Control works?

We have wrapped the Google Chart API call with our Wolf Chart Control. As soon as you configure your chart in Wolf Designer and publish it, our Chart control makes a call to Google Chart API to create an image of the chart with the data from the selected data source while configuring the chart. And it sends back the chart image to your application.

How secure is data using Google API in this manner?

The data sent is in encrypted form using any of the three types of encoding depending upon the type of chart: Simple Text Encoding, Text encoding with data scaling, Extended encoding.

How did you manage to get the data dynamically for chart generation?

The backbone of Wolf PaaS are XML and the Business Rule Engine. And these work, at their best, in extracting data from the Database and performing operations on it. First of all the data is extracted from the database in the XML format after performing the operation defined in the Business rule. Then that XML data is tranformed into the source for the chart using the XSLT tranformation. In this way, our Business Rule Engine and XML/XSLT technology has made our task easy while extracting the data dynamically.

How many charts can I make using Wolf Chart Control for my Wolf SaaS application?

Virtually there is no limit of charts that can be built using Wolf Chart Control, but Google Chart API has a restriction of 250,000 calls per day, if you can reach this limit in a day for your application.

Go ahead, enhance your application look & feel by activating smart charts for your SaaS ...

Wolf Frameworks Platform-as-a-Service widens their market reach by adding complete support for Mozilla Firefox web browser users.

WOLF Frameworks officially opens support for Mozilla Firefox web browser users.

Wolf, the standards compliant cloud computing Platform for designing & delivering business applications, today opened their framework for Mozilla Firefox web browser users. WOLF Platform-as-a-Service Technology assists Entrepreneurs, Application Developers, IT Service Providers and Business Leaders to get their customized Business Applications developed 70 percent faster on the cloud at less than half the cost.

"Technology is our promise and we will continue to make it easy & deliver lot more functionality as per our customer’s needs. Mozilla Firefox users can now work on Wolf SaaS Application Development Framework and get complete support from us. Officially we are open to IE 6, 7, 8 and all versions of Mozilla Firefox 3.0 onwards." said Mr. Ralph Vaz, Founder & CTO WOLF Frameworks.

Wolf Frameworks Cloud Computing platform is used for developing & delivering customized business processes as SaaS applications. It helps to drive additional revenue for IT Solution Providers and Domain Experts by rapidly converting their ideas as SaaS applications & offering these applications on a recurring subscription fee.

It is time to say 'Good bye' to standard software packages and 'Welcome' affordable and tailor made customized applications which work the way your business needs - available all the time - online. Wolf platform requires little technical skills and no up-front capital expenses & introduces a paradigm shift where complex applications get developed within weeks & links software service provider’s revenues with customer’s business growth and not just standard software development skills.

Click to read more...

Activate Smart Visual Analytics using Wolf Charts

I'm sure you've all been wondering about this period of silence from the team. Truth be told, its been a really busy month for us and we've been working on a couple of surprises for our customers.

So whats the first surprise?

If you've been keeping an eye on Wolf (Hint: an earlier blog post, our screenshot gallery or the Wolf Designer) this one should be easy to guess. :-)

The Wolf Designer is now equipped with a chart and graph control. The Wolf Chart Control is a point-and-click interface that helps you to visually represent the data of your Wolf SaaS Application, allowing you to present visual analytics using fancy charts and graphs.

Here's a glimpse into some of the charts built using the point-and-click Wolf Chart control:



















Also, you can post these charts as dashboard items for quick reference or as Navigation Menus in your Application. Our partner team members are really hooked onto the Chart Control and have been converting their Application reports into charts and graphs.

It doesn't end here! We will be introducing more chart types for the Wolf Chart Control soon :-) Note: Currently the Wolf Chart Control is enabled only for IE users.

What the second BIG surprise?

This one's a biggie and its been blowing in the wind for a while now. I'm not going to let it out so soon. Stay tunned ...

Wolf Frameworks to participate & demonstrate designing & delivering a situational application LIVE at the RaDD 09 showdown contest

The RaDD showdown 09 contest dates are now confirmed and I must say it’s going to be an exciting morning for all of us at Wolf Frameworks. Nothing feels better than getting a targeted audience and the opportunity to show off our product/technology in the marketplace and get more feedbacks.

For all my friends & partners who are still unaware; Powerinthecloud, the Situational Application Resource Center is organizing a LIVE contest called RaDD Showdown 09 to demonstrate how different PaaS-based RADD (Rapid Application Development and Deployment) platforms are capable of building complex business applications in a spectacularly short period of time, increase customer awareness and show how different PaaS platforms fit into the hands of different users groups to deliver different functionality.

In the true spirit of the PaaS community, the organizers have pulled down the idea of ranking/benchmarking vendors against each other, decided to go with an independent evaluation of the submitted solution and have only allowed submitting a single application running on a specific vendor’s platform to reduce the noise and room for hurried judgmental errors. I guess this gives us a rare opportunity to showcase those small little things in our product which makes our customers smile – which otherwise would have never showed up against a direct feature to feature comparison.

Like any other competition, this too will bring some key product packaging & positioning questions for us and I will briefly touch upon some points later, but hey – Here’s an opportunity to be visible without burning a dollar, participate in growing the community, chance to answer the common myths around our product segment & wrongly perceived drawbacks and distinguish ourselves from others and share more. The more you share, the more people like you and the more they follow --- Remember: Twitter :)

Do all the PaaS vendors offer similar technology to participate in such a generic PaaS evaluation program? I don’t think so. On the contrary, we must be very different to co-exist together in such an economic condition. Are all the different PaaS vendors going to deliver - complete word-to-word specification within 6 hours time? I don’t think so but we will attempt to deliver a key working solution model around the business case using our PaaS. Will other users find it easy to tweak our functionality, change the software design or add another report easily? I don’t think so. Most of us have developed the system keeping different target users in mind (Developers/Business Analyst/End Users/etc) – and I am sure we have our own terms, vocabulary and have our learning curve to explain how things are done internally. However easy and DIY friendly we are – we choose to be different and no competition can benchmark us as right or wrong.

Design considerations & tradeoffs against a certain delivery target are always crucial for a framework. Flexibility and delivery capabilities are like two sides of a same coin, pretty similar to Packaging and Positioning. At Wolf we have encapsulated development layer & empowered business analyst to design business applications easily – we have ‘Packaged’ our product to fit into a particular ‘Place’ in the marketplace. It might become obvious that even a BA might hit limitations while working on our platform and then the obvious question is: Who are the other users we are accommodating to fulfill which functions of our system delivery capabilities. Have we added the ability for developers to change and play a role inside the system? How encapsulated and how open we are for different users will also help to determine how we perform in a generic PaaS evaluation program.

All said & done, this is going to a great exercise. How many times you get a velvet carpet to show your product to a well informed partner and user community and see how others deal with the same challenge as you go thru. This is our chance to develop the next Lego Style - PaaS Mindstorms. Only this time -- it’s not going to be one platform. Many platform, many users and many ROBOTS to walk the talk. See you all soon…

Cheers,

Sunny Ghosh
Director & CEO
Wolf Platform-as-a-Service

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Differentiating Wolf SaaS Designing Platform vs. Traditional App Development

I get to answer this question all the time. Let me share a quick overview for our partners and customers on how they benefit using Wolf SaaS Application Platform. And why does the world want to create Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) type Business Applications? I will skip this obvious explaination for today.

Let me remind you; whether it’s Enterprise Developers, Business Analysts, Organization Process Managers or ISV Developers – the value that our platform brings to the table lies in our ability to create smarter, better and interoperable business process driven SaaS applications – Rapidly with lesser cost using the Wolf ‘Standards’ driven Platform. We do this by:

1. Offering our browser based code free environment to design and deliver applications over the Cloud (Develop and Deliver)

2. What typically will take months can now be achieved within weeks with additonal customization .

3. What used to be very technical – is made lot simpler with Wolf. It’s no more about code; it’s about point and click configurations and a great design. No DEVELOPMENT required!

4. We help you to innovate without worrying about existing infrastructures and manage your business needs & changes more efficiently.

5. With zero annual maintenance fees, we deliver new cool features and tools to make your life a lot easier.

6. We help to dramatically lower your TCO (Software Licensing, Hardware, Bandwidth, Development Time, Deployment, Access & Maintenance) and reduce your risk on investments.

7. We provide 24/7/365 service availability with high SLA's so that you can scale your business and even get hands-on assistance from our Partner community to design your business solutions rapidly.

8. Don’t get us wrong, we don’t sell softwares… We only rent our framework for building other softwares…

If you wanted to put this down in a comparative chart, perhaps this is how it will look:



Our motivation behind giving a totality to the Platform is targeted towards making life a lot easier for our partners to service their customers within limited budgets and time. In delivering these functionalities, we did not take the easier route, which was? Tie all of the elements: the user interface, business rules, database, hosting and the API’s together – we kept them quiet separate and as loosely bound as we can.

Which means, you could do many things with one technology platform without being restricted. While this is more of a technical differentiation, customers gain financially a lot more using Wolf than any other SaaS Development Platform. Here’s a how you gain financially:

Financial Differentiation



The key advantages for your organization:

1. One Platform for SaaS Application Designing and Deployment
2. Spend Less Money, RBI (Return Before Investment)
3. Higher Efficiency - reduced cost with Rapid Implementation Cycle
4. Personalized, Easy to Customize further
5. No maintenance Fee, Better Service, Nothing to manage or monitor
6. 'Standards' Driven Platform which allows you to work across multiple data sources & systems

I am happy to share more in my next post and hope this one provides a outline on how you can benefit using Wolf. Until then, don't forget to register & give us a try for your next SaaS Application requirement.

Cheers,

Sunny Ghosh
Director & CEO
Wolf Platform-as-a-Service

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Access Help Documentation and Live Technical Support Service...

Designing application on Wolf Platform just got easier with the recently released 'Quick Help and Support Service' section. Targeted to guide you with consistent help through documentations in the form of User Guides (.pdf format), searchable FAQs and Videos, more and more documentation-reference manuals are being added on a weekly basis.

Registered users can also contact our Live Technical Support through 'Ask support' section via their account or by dropping an email at support@wolfframeworks.com. The Live Technical Support is made available from Monday to Friday during IST and CET working hours and is aimed towards providing technical assistance on designing & working on Wolf Platform and achieving functionalities which helps you to move forward...

We hope you benefit and enjoy the service...

Meet us at Cloudcamp Bangalore, 29th March 2009..

CloudCamp is being organised for the first time in Bangalore. Putting together Cloud Computing Vendors, Technologists, Developers and Early adopter Startups to exchange their ideas and experiences regarding Cloud Computing. CloudCamp will be an semi-structured conference with invited speakers from the industry as well as several breakout sessions in unconference style to facilitate discussion amongst participants.

WOLF Frameworks is participating and our CEO is holding a session on, 'Design and run your business application within minutes'. We look forward to making this an interactive and exciting session for all the participants.

Looking forward to seeing you all again @ Cloud camp Bangalore ...

Newly added WOLF Screenshots Gallery section

The latest addition to our website is the page which shows you the gallery of screenshots of different WOLF User Interfaces. You can check out the page here.

The screenshots gallery gives you a glimpse into the Wolf Designer, the Runtime user interfaces for admin and application user and also some of the charts and reports built using WOLF. The Screenshots page will be updated regularly to give you an insight into new features and changes in Wolf Platform user interfaces.

P.S. – Please revisit this section soon to get a preview of the upcoming release of the WOLF Chart Control which allows you to design charts and graphs – representing your data as fancy dashboard items in your application.

Transformation of Coghead customer applications to WOLF Platform...

Welcome to the world of executable XML. Here are a few observations from our Coghead application conversion process for customer applications.

1] Transformation from the Coghead Application XML to Wolf Entity Tree: Coghead used hierarchichal and relational structuring of data which converts into a pure relational model in WOLF. Each of the Collections are identified and the equivalent data structures are created in WOLF. Collections having lists generate separate Entities to hold the data for these lists. All collections of data including lists are treated as entities in Wolf. Collections having Detail Grids are converted into equivalent Gridwidgets in WOLF and Master Detail Relations are established. Linked fields are also created.

The Coghead XML shows that they had the capability of having multiple Collections with the Same Root level names. In WOLF this is an area of conflict and the import transformations fail to distinguish the Entities in such scenarios. The WOLF team here has taken some manual effort to make slight alterations to the Root level names before providing it to the Import Routines.

2] Transformation of Coghead Actions to WOLF Business Rules: Coghead actions convert to business rules easily inside WOLF. The algorithmic structure of the Actions is captured. Expression formats used by Coghead do not import as there is a lot of string manipulation involved in this process. For reasonably sized projects it might be quicker to reconstruct the expressions using the WOLF business rules interface. Simple expressions that can find equivalence in WOLF have been picked up automatically.

3] Transformation of tabs: Each Tab/Form in Coghead is a navigation item for WOLF. WOLF does not create a tab per form but creates multiple screens per entities. The types of screens that we have are Data Views (also referred to as search screens), Edit screens, Report Screens, Chart Screens, Dashboard Screens etc. There could be multiple screens associated to a single Entity. A “Navigation Item” then opens up a single screen. As an output of the transformation, there is a Navigation Item for each View in Coghead. The Editable forms are linked to the Search Screen.

So, in Simple terms: Navigation Item  Linked to Search Screen  Linked to Entity Editable Form Screen.

4] Data Imports: Data imports deal with complex mapping structures. For the import of simple non related data WOLF’s import program generates simple business rules which handles mapping of data when the data XML’s are uploaded.

Basics of a Custom Edit Screen in Wolf

To understand the basics of an Edit screen in Wolf Platform as a Service refer to my previous post here .

As mentioned in my previous post, an Edit Screen in Wolf Platform-as-a-Service allows the visual representation of your Entity.
All the Edit Screens in Wolf are contained inside an Entity. The Default Edit Screen gets created automatically everytime the user creates an Entity. However, a Custom Edit Screen needs to be created by the User.

An Entity can contain only a single Default Edit Screen. However, the user may create any number of Custom Edit Screens in the Entity. A Custom Edit Screen can use the fields defined in the Default Edit Screen allowing for flexible representation of an Entity and its fields/data.
It is important to note that the user cannot create any new fields in a Custom Edit Screen.

Lets consider the Entity below as our initial reference. The Entity "Orange" contains four fields defined inside the the Default Edit Screen - Color, Size, Shape and Price.

To create a Custom Edit Screen for your Entity, Right-click on the Entity name --> Select "New" --> "New Edit Screen"

It is mandatory to specify a name for the Custom Edit Screen.

To start using the fields of the Default Edit Screen in the Custom Edit Screen, you will need to create a tab and a section inside it.

To create a tab inside the Custom Edit Screen, Right-click on the Edit Screen --> Select "New" --> "New Tab"

You may optionally specify a name for this new tab.

To create a new section inside the tab, Right-click on the Tab--> Select "New" --> "New Section"

You may optionally specify a name for this new section.

You can then start adding fields to this Custom Edit Screen. To add fields in the section of the Edit Screen, use the point and click UI to choose the fields.

As you can see, only the fields defined in the Default Edit Screen are accessible as part of the Custom Edit Sceen. The User may only create a label field in the Custom Edit Screen.

The user can create as many Custom Edit Screens as he wants for flexible representation of Entity fields/data. However, there will be only a single Default Edit Screen that acts as the master repository of the fields for the Entity.
As an example, the User may create a Custom Edit Screen for holding all the dimensional data of the Orange Entity such as shape, size, etc. and another Custom Edit Screen for holding other information such as price, color, etc. The User can then link these two Edit Screens to different Navigation Items and restrict the user access to Navigation Items as per requirements.

Go ahead and try the power of the Custom Edit Screens and see how they can help you to design a more complete application.

WOLF Frameworks nominated among the Top 10 Internet companies by The Smart Techie

WOLF Frameworks Eyeing to be a Wolf in the SaaS Market ...

The SmartTechie recognizes the crucial role the Internet companies play and is proud to present "Top 10 Internet Companies Most Likely to Succeed" Merit roll. A distinguished panel comprising accomplished Indian CEOs & CIOs of public companies, VCs, analysts, founders of other VC funded companies including the SmartTechie editorial board decided on the top 10 Internet companies for 2009.

Bangalore based Wolf Frameworks is offering a 100 percent browser based Web application design and development Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for creating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) type business applications on the Internet. Read more about the company.

Read more: http://www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine/fullstory.php/YRXQ516685241

Does PaaS Need Migration Standards or Standard Platforms? By Phil Wainewright (Excerpts)

Complete article: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/connectedweb/2009/02/does_paas_need_migration_stand.php

In fact, a Coghead rival called Wolf Frameworks has actually released some code that takes a Coghead application definition file, parses the XML and converts it into the Wolf equivalent, to "restore all entities, screens, business rules, complete application design & even import data." Like me, situational apps expert Jonathan Sapir argues for automated migration standards: "if all the vendors could come up with a single standard XML definition for situational application platforms, we could completely eliminate the lock-in problem!"

WOLF Frameworks attempting to bring the much needed PaaS Migration Standards in place, providing application designers with freedom from being locked inside a cloud based software platform. Read more: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/connectedweb/2009/02/does_paas_need_migration_stand.php

Why does the WOLF Platform support IE browser to start with?

If you are wondering why WOLF only supports IE, this is a good post to read further...

A Client platform for deployment. We had to pick one and in the beginning were all Microsoft guys. We were debating using of Flash for delivery then we debated some more...

The Wolf platform is built using 2 disintegrated platforms:

1] The web services Engine

This is the one that represents the real application and its business rules. It has no dependency on the host application interacting with it. Establish a session/ authenticate and use it in any fashion. This partially integrates with the database platform but we'll discuss that in another article.

2] The Client Interface

The client Interface or the User Interface is entirely HTML, Javascript and AJAX to interact with server. The Client interface has purely been derived in this fashion.

1] How is the application going to be delivered?
The application will be delivered over an Internet Browser.

2] Who are the target users of the application Runtime
The target users of the application runtime will mostly be teams who understand the implementation of the business applications and their roles in it. The application functionality would decide the target users. The browser once again is considered only as a method of delivery for a functional business application.

3] Why not any other browsers.
Browsers by nature have been supporting W3c Standards but then they also prefer to add a few fancies which tend to start making their own fans. For example (for a web developer) rounded corners are actually quite simple using "-moz-border-radius/ -webkit-border-radius" while working with Mozilla/Firefox and Safari 3. If the goal is to only deliver functionality why would one bother to have images to make up rounded corners for other browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer.

4] Which browsers should we support on mobile devices.
Well, we havn't answered this one yet but do know that some don't support javascript, some don't require styling and some don't have html browsers. For now, we have been delivering and testing specific mobile browsers on customer request for specific customer applications.

We are wondering, should we just put the effort to make a client host for web delivery?? Maybe, our own browser??

Ralph Vaz
Founder

WOLF Platform-as-a-Service opens their XML framework to read & restore Coghead customer applications...

WOLF Platform-as-a-Service opens their XML framework to read & restore stranded Coghead customer applications without any programming or initial financial commitment. Read more about the detailed news at http://www.wolfframeworks.com/pressrelease.asp

To take advantage of the offer, Coghead users are requested to take the following steps:

Step 1: Please visit the following URL http://www.wolfframeworks.com/ and register for the 2 user Free account and activate your WOLF account and create a dummy business application. NOTE: Even if you have more than 2 users in your Coghead based application, WOLF will not charge Coghead customers for the next 60 days.

Step 2: Please log into your Coghead account and export your business application design, download the attached application. Go to the ‘Ask Support’ section after logging into your WOLF account, describe your Coghead application in a few quick lines and upload your Coghead Business Design XML. WOLF will send you an email confirmation. Note: You are the owner of all Intellectual Property & Application Designs residing under your WOLF account. For more information, read the WOLF User License Agreement: http://www.wolfframeworks.com/licenseagreement.asp/

Step 3: The Coghead based business application will be transformed into a WOLF based application, enabled active and made up and running replacing the dummy application created under your WOLF account. You will receive a notification email in your email ID to verify the application design.

Step 4: Send us the data extract from your Coghead application. It can be part of the same XML sent earlier or you might have to export your application data from Coghead in CSV format. Our team will work together with you to activate your data and setup the security roles & activate the user management structure, URL redirection, etc. Your application along with data and users will be up and running with minimal efforts. If you need more detailed information, please drop a line to support@wolfframeworks.com

Coghead customers need no initial investment to get their applications transferred to their WOLF account, up & running for the next 60 days. Users can leverage the WOLF Platform technology benefits, request to subscribe for the WOLF source code ESCROW service & opt for the appropriate users Business Plan within the next 60 days. WOLF Platform is offered on a per user per month based user subscription fee. You can view the Business Plan Pricing @ http://www.wolfframeworks.com/pricing.asp/

Interested customers in the United States can reach WOLF Team directly & talk to
Mr. Uday Bendala: +1 (248) 327 3541 (Monday to Friday EST working hours) or otherwise reach WOLF team at +91 80 2572 1700 or +91 98451 66926 or +1 (732) 978 4977 (8am to 2pm EST). For more information about WOLF’s program for Coghead customers, write to coghead@wolfframeworks.com to know more about WOLF Partner program, please send an email to Jerry Ram – jerry.ram@wolfframeworks.com

Quick introduction to WOLF Platform-as-a-Service

Introduction to WOLF Platform As A Service

View more presentations from CloudComputing. (tags: wolf platform-as-a-service)

FORRESTER REPORT ON PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE

Jonathan Sapir from "Powerinthecloud" recently reviewed the Forrester Report on Platform-as-a-Service. His review is very interesting, read below:
>>>

Forrester Research has an interesting document out called "Platform-as-a-Service is here; Can it help you?" Their answer is that PaaS products "are providing value to application development and program management teams". Indeed.

Some of the products mentioned in the document I am very familiar with - including Allrounds, which we at SilverTree Systems helped develop, and of course Coghead, where we were responsible for building pieces of the platform. I was surprised to see Magic Software on the list - I personally started working with Magic Software back in 1989, and still have clients using Magic applications we built many years ago. Nice to see Magic entering the 21st century!

There were some new players I had never seen before, like Orangescape, which appears to be something along the same lines as Wolf and Longjump.

The document uses the term "4GL", which I haven't seen used in quite a long time. PaaS products are broken down by 3GL, 4GL and Business Analysts, then by content-oriented versus transaction business applications. Here are some other ways to break it down:




Complete credit for this post goes to Jonathan Sapir: http://www.powerinthecloud.com/blog/2009/2/19/forrester-report-on-platform-as-a-service.html

Exporting data to Excel from your Wolf Applications without programming

A lesser known fact about your Wolf SaaS application is that it is not a stand alone application :) In fact your Wolf based software applications can interact with other Wolf Applications and a host of external software & systems without programming at all ...

We have listed examples of Wolf Applications interacting with other software systems in two of our previous posts:
1. RSS News aggregation using Wolf - obtaining the data from a third party RSS , converting the XML to Wolf Document Record format and storing/displaying it using Wolf.
2. Invoking a Wolf SaaS application from a .NET program - Capturing data returned from a Wolf Business Rule and using this data in a .NET application.

Today we will see how this interaction with external softwares can be simplified to the mere click of a button. We are going to see how the data from a Wolf application can be exported to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet without programming and with the simple click of a button.

Consider you have a Wolf application that stores the basic details of a student. This includes the Name, the Date of Birth and Age of the student. Lets say we need to save the records of some students into an Excel sheet.

A snapshot of a Wolf Application Search Template containing these student records is shown below -


You can save this data into an Excel spreadsheet by clicking on the "Export to Excel" button found in the top half of the Search Template(marked in RED below).

Clicking this button throws a popup asking you whether you want to Save or Open the Excel Spreadsheet containing the student records.

The resultant Excel sheet with the student records is shown below -

Voila.... you have your entire data saved in a spreadsheet with a single click. Quick and Easy!!
Go ahead and try out the many export/import features of Wolf PaaS.

Any challenges in importing or exporting your data ? Want to know how you can connect an external application to Wolf ? Feel free to get in touch. We are happy to help.

How to make money using WOLF e-Widgets? Are they free ..?

Wondering on how to save and make money using WOLF e-Widgets? WOLF based application widgets are free ...?

Assume you are finance professional and have customers who consult you on asset planning and check on their current mortgage and housing loans on a regular basis. If you design a simple web based application using WOLF called ‘EMI Calculator’ and expose the application to every visitor of your own website, you reduce a lot of operative time and can work with them on more strategic activities. For your customers this means, entering their housing loan amount, tenure for the loan and see the current interest rate & EMI (Every Month Installment) with a click of a button.

How much are you paying WOLF Platform for your web application ‘EMI Calculator’?

WOLF charges you based upon the number of users registered inside your WOLF account. You sign up for the WOLF service based on the different business plans. Two users are free for your standard WOLF account business plan - One is the WOLF account holder itself and the second user is the one you create to test your application as a user. You can give access to different Entities (Data), menu/navigation item, Business Rules & Reports to the user via the RunTime Environment as a administrator/designer for the application.

How much will it cost if all my web visitors use the ‘EMI Calculator Form’ application? Does WOLF charge you based on every user who clicks on the EMI calculator?

In our last post we described that you need a WOLF application user and tie the user to a specific domain name and a key to embed the application as a web widget inside another public or private website. You can read the steps here: http://wolfpaas.blogspot.com/2009/01/building-e-widgets.html

So your web visitors need not be part of the WOLF registered user for your EMI Calculator application and thus you make such a feature available to your customers completely free J Business Application functionality extended to your customers FREE…

Hey, but when do you pay?

When you cross more than 2 users, WOLF Platform-as-a-Service charges you based upon your business plan. If you cross more than 2 and add a single user – you only pay $ 10/- a month. In the case of the EMI calculator, you have one domain URL – one key and one user. But if you were to add the same EMI calculator to another website, you would need another user name, another domain URL and one more key. So you would have to pay based upon the users added inside your WOLF account. So one WOLF account, one new user, one widget embedded inside one website (localhost or public) is FREE…

How To: Use Power of Properties, Part 4.2 - For Entity -> Search Template

Hi Friends,

Today, as promised, we will learn more about the properties of entities and its sub-elements. As you can see in figure 4.2.1, there are various sub-elements of entity which make it more powerful and core of an application. This is the place where you can customize the look and feel of your application as well as the functionalities of your application. Let us cash the power of Wolf Platform with efficient use of properties for these entities.

Figure 4.2.1: Entity Explorer and Elements present in it

As shown in figure 4.2.2, there are three basic elements of an entity, namely: Relations, Search and Edit Screen. Today we will be covering the properties for sub-elements of Search element in entity. In the Search Element, we can add the Search Template for the Edit Screen we have developed. The properties of the Search Template may be configured to represent the data in the form of Search Screens, Reports, Dashboard Widgets, etc. After designing your Search Template, remember to link your Search Template to a Navigation item to make it accessible in the Run environment of the application.

Figure 4.2.2: Search Template And its Properties

There are various simple and surprising properties of Search Template which we can set to make our search template look more promising.

Template Name: You should give the name of your Search Template here. It is a mandatory field.

Figure 4.2.3: Business Rule Property of Search Template

Business Rule: Get the results of the search from a business rule if specified, as shown in figure 4.2.3. Leave this property blank to perform a standard search on the Entity.

Figure 4.2.4: Hide Quick View Property of Search Template is disabled.
Figure 4.2.5: Hide Quick View Property of Search Template is enabled.

Hide Quick View: If enabled then you will not see a non editable preview of the Entity data when an item is selected, as shown in figure 4.2.4 and figure 4.2.5. It should be used only if the Entity contains information that cannot be accommodated into the columns of [Results] table.

Figure 4.2.6: Hide [New/Open/Delete] Properties of Search Template

Hide [New/Open/Delete]: If disabled/enabled, these Properties show/Hide the New/Open/Delete tool from the toolbar (refer figure 4.2.6).

Figure 4.2.7: Edit Template Property of Search Template

Edit Template: This setting allows you to control which of the defined Edit Screens should be linked to the New and Open Tools that appear on the toolbar.
This also controls the details that are displayed in the Quick View section of the current search template If this value is left unspecified or cleared then the default Edit Screen is used (refer figure 4.2.7).

Disallow Add: Disallow the user to add a record through the Results table itself. This will only work if the search does not point to a Business Rule in addition to his security privileges.

Disallow Edit: Disallow the user to add a record through the Results table itself. This will only work if the search does not point to a Business Rule in addition to his security privileges.

Figure 4.2.8: Output of Search Screen using Show Levels property of Search Template

Show levels: The results table is capable of showing grouped information, as shown in figure 4.2.8. This can be set to true if every record of the results data source has a element.

Figure 4.2.9: Output of Search Screen with sequence number using Show Numbering property of Search Template

Show Numbering: The results table shows a numbering in the first column by default, as represented in figure 4.2.9. Uncheck here if you do not want it to be displayed.

Now let us go into the next level of Search template. We will find two sub-levels of Criteria and Results. Within the Results level, we can add the fields which we want in the search screen, such as the Present Address, Permanent Address, etc. in our example of Contact Details.

Figure 4.2.10: Fields and their properties in results level of Search template

Let us here take example of the checkbox field, the properties of most of the fields are common and easy to use.

Display Name: It is a mandatory property to give name of the field.

Display Width (px) : You can also provide the width in which the particular field should be displayed.

Sorting Order: Select the sorting order of the fields, either Ascending or Descending.

Example:

Assume the following case
Field1 has sorting order="0" and sort direction = "ascending"
Field2 has sorting order="1" and sort direction = "descending"
This will be treated as
Field1 asc, Field2 desc

Sorting Direction: The default sort direction for the results table. Make sure that you have defined the sorting order otherwise this setting will be ignored.

ReadOnly: This will determine, on checking/unchecking, if the column for this field should be readonly or not.

Hidden: This will determine, on checking/unchecking, if the coulmn for this field should be hidden or not.

Thus we have finally covered Search Template properties with easy, haven't we? This session on properties will definitely help you extract more out of the available resources of WOLF and use them in your application smoothly.

See ya friends,

Bye, till the next session on 'Edit Screen Properties'....hope you will not miss that as this would be the most interesting and base of all the sessions.

Regards

ArtDeveloper

Creating and embedding WOLF based applications as eWidgets in your own website

Hello Friends,

Here's the promised post on Creating eWidgets using WOLF Platform-as-a-Service ...

e-Widgets are web based functionality developed using Wolf Platform and made available as part of a different website anywhere in the world. It is a small piece of codes that take the data of specific application from a specific Business Rule. These are XML based data. Using XSLT the data are extracted & the output is produced in HTML format according to the user needs.

Through ewidgets we can restructure the data in any format. To get the data from WOLF Runtime Environment JavaScript or ASP is used. To embed this widget you need to generate a key. For the key, you need a user name and a Domain/localhost URL.

Quick steps to create a eWidget using WOLF Platform-as-a-Service:

1. Create HTML file.
2. Create XSLT file
Write your code according to how you want the data.
3. In the HTML body section
Put the following code

<div id="plForm"><script type="'text/javascript'" src="'http://run.wolfframeworks.com/webservices/wf.handlers/javascript.ashx?" appid="ur_appid&key=" service="processbusinessrule&rulename=" callback="writePandLSheet&mode="></script></div>

Let me explain you the details of the above code and what it is trying to achieve:

Javascript.ashx is a handler file.
Appid: write your WOLF based Business Application ID (AppID).You can see your Appid when you access your runtime or design time of wolf platform. You can see your appid in the address bar. Look at this sample URL (http://run.wolfframeworks.com/?appid=119DDDD_a205)
The AppID is: 119DDDD_a205

Key : Write your own public widget key

Steps to create a public key for your eWidget. (Please remember that your widget key is always mapped to a specific user name and tied to a domain URL. You need to add a user to generate a key)

1.Go to run time mode of your application.
2.Enter your administrator or design mode user id & password.
3.Go to manage users & click on find now
4.Please open a user name (the user who would have access to the widget) & go to Entity Data Access section & give access to the user domain. This is a system generated Entity. You need to choose the Solution Root folder and give him 'edit' and 'delete' rights.
5. Do the same thing for menu access.
6.Now log inside the Runtime Mode as the user who has access to the Domain Entity.
7.Click on the 'All Navigation Item' bar & go to the Application Domain
8. Then Click on User Domain and add a new entry.

Enter the domain Name : it could your localhost or your websitename.com URL . Please
remember, this is the URL from where the WOLF based application will be embedded
as a eWidget.
Enter the key : Put a numerical key - any combination is fine. Just remember it :)
Enter the user : Put the name of the user

Now how to use & embed the widget in your code using the Key

The Key is used to authenticate the user. Instead of giving your user id & password you can put a key and so no user name login is required. The Key which we generated is mapped to a specific user. The mapped user only has the access to use & embed the widget in his declared URL. The Key is also mapped to the domain name. If the domain name is localhost then the application can only be accessed through localhost only. If it is mapped to Your Website name then it is accessible through only your website.

service=processbusinessrule : This statement will process the BusinessRule.
Rulename= Your Business Rule Name (Please make sure you use the right Business Rule Name)
callback=writePandLSheet: This statement is the name of the method and is used to transform XML through XSLT

<head>
<script>
function writeDC(wsfXMLDocument)
{
var s = wsfXMLDocument;
xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xmlDoc.async="false";
xmlDoc.loadXML(s);

xmlDoc1=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xmlDoc1.async="false";
xmlDoc1.load("XslFile.xsl");

var xsl=xmlDoc1;
var ex=xmlDoc.transformNode(xmlDoc1);
document.getElementById("plForm").innerHTML=ex;
}
</head>
</script>

wsfXMLDocument is data taken from BusinessRule. It is in XML format.
The XML is loaded using loadXML.
Now load your XSL file.
The XML is transformed using transformNode.
Now put the formatted data in div using getElementById.

mode is xml
WOLF Format

eWidgets Format (this is how it looks)

Using WOLF based eWidgets you can get data in Your own Format and embed in any website by generating a key. Please try the process for any of your WOLF based application and let us know.

Regards,

Sharp Developer