Business Objects SA on Wednesday announced the availability of BusinessObjects Application Foundation 2.5, the latest version of the companys developers framework for building analytic applications.
The move comes a day after Business Objects announced that it had joined the UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) project, claiming to be the first business intelligence software vendor to do so.
The new version of Application Framework is focused on enabling developers to build more flexible dashboards that provide a top-level view of key metrics and drill-down from any metric to operational details, Business Objects officials said.
This version supports set-based and time series analysis capabilities that enable business users to understand and predict trends. Also, because it supports the integration of real-time notification into BI applications, Version 2.5 allows customers to build dashboards that alert users to critical changes in the underlying data. This enables customers to “hard wire” their application into their transactional system for instant reaction to changes, without the change having to be recorded in the data warehouse first, said officials with the San Jose, Calif., company.
The Application Foundation 2.5 architecture also now supports JSP (JavaServer Pages) and integrates with J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application servers.
It includes a Web-based interface for developing sets, which are customized groupings of specific items. This enables application builders and power users to create sets and deploy metrics and analytics against them, all from a single, Web interface, company officials said.
Application Framework 2.5 can be used to build new analytic applications or customize Business Objects packaged analytic applications.
As part of its Web services push, Business Objects announced Tuesday that it was the first BI software vendor to join UDDI, an industry initiative to create a platform-independent, open framework for describing services, discovering businesses, and integrating business services using the Internet.
Much of the companys Web services initiative revolves around building UDDI-based directories of information shared between companies and their business partners. The company is joining UDDI to help shape the standards that these so-called next-generation business extranets will be delivered on, company officials said.