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Q-Link Technologies Inc. Tuesday announced a new version of its application development platform that features component assembly and integration capabilities and enables new or less experienced Java developers to build enterprise Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications.
Version 5.0 of the Q-Link platform was announced at the Gartner Inc. Integration and Web Services conference in Los Angeles. Greg Wilson, a founder and chief technology officer of the Tampa, Fla., company, said Q-Link combines component assembly and design-time integration to help developers complete projects with less rigor, particularly in coding, testing and debugging their applications.
“We provide an abstraction layer above the J2EE level, as well as a business process management offering,” Wilson said. “Our product reduces complexity so the average developer can build out these kinds of applications.”
Q-Link enables developers to create applications from reusable components, Wilson said. This speeds up development time and cuts costs, he said. In fact, Wilson said, Q-Link has been proven to cut the time and cost of developing applications by up to 70 percent.
He said the technology consists of three main elements: a development environment based on such standards as J2EE, XForms and XPath; a suite of business process management services, including a workflow engine and business rules; and a new application model that enables developers to visually build applications based on business objects rather than Java code.
The forms support ranks among the major enhancements in Version 5.0, according to Wilson. The inclusion of XForms enables developers to build applications in a drag-and-drop scheme, by dragging components from a repository and dropping them onto a form. In addition, while Q-Link 5.0 features many form components itself, it also supports third-party or customer-built components, Wilson said. And any form component can be reused in building new applications.
In this context, “XPath is a big deal,” Wilson said. “Were providing a framework to build these components and to take them out to different systems.”
Q-Link deploys on any J2EE application server, including BEA Systems Inc.s BEA WebLogic.
Of the product, Wilson said: “Developers like it because it reduces their work, architects like it because were J2EE, business analysts like it because they can build applications visually, and management likes it because we produce metrics and documentation.”
The Q-Link architecture is well-suited to building Web services and service-oriented architecture development, he added.
The product will ship in June, the company said.
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