OutSystems Platform Technical Overview

OutSystems Platform Technical Overview
OVERVIEW
OutSystems technology combines the productivity offered by visual modeling tools
with the level of extensibility found in integration suites and custom development
frameworks. The OutSystems Platform gives you everything you need to rapidly
create and deploy enterprise applications and then change those applications at any
stage of their life cycle. At the core of our value proposition you will find a highly
intuitive visual environment and a breakthrough deployment technology that is
helping businesses deliver business applications and services in weeks, instead of
months or years.
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
OutSystems Platform Overview
OutSystems technology combines the productivity
offered by visual modeling tools with the level of
extensibility found in integration suites and custom
development frameworks. The OutSystems Platform
gives you everything you need to rapidly create and
deploy enterprise applications and then change those
applications at any stage of their life cycle. At the core
of our value proposition you will find a highly intuitive
visual environment and a breakthrough deployment
technology that is helping businesses deliver business
applications and services in weeks, instead of months
or years.
All-in-One Application Development,
Integration, Maintenance, and Operation
The power of the OutSystems Platform begins with a
set of tools and services that fully automate the
process of creating enterprise applications that
integrate with existing systems and reach users
through web, email, and mobile user interfaces:
1-Click Publishing
After experiencing the OutSystems Platform “1-Click
Publishing” feature, you will consider the traditional
process of deploying applications into production
systems as nothing less than obsolete. From a single
mouse click in Service Studio or Integration Studio, you
will be able to run and test your application in a server
regardless of the kinds of changes you made to the
user interface, to the business rules, to the database,
or to the integration adapters.
Best-of-all, the OutSystems Platform generates
standard .Net or Java applications, makes all
application code accessible, and does not require any
runtime engines to operate the produced applications.
Additionally, during the 1-Click Publishing process,
versions and configurations are automatically stored
and maintained.
Once you have your applications up and running, a set
of Environment Operation services will also enable
security, auditing, logging, and monitoring for every
application running.
Intuitive and Visual Application Design
Using OutSystems Service Studio, you will create and
compose applications using a highly intuitive and visual
design environment. User interaction flows, data
models, business rules, scheduled processes, web
services, and integration adapters are accessible within
a visual environment and can be used to create
complete applications using a simple and intuitive dragand-drop process.
All-in-One Application Model
OutSystems Service Studio is a codeless
comprehensive visual environment that empowers
application developers, with any class of expertise, to
rapidly create and modify enterprise applications and
business services.
OutSystems Service Center is the centralized
management console that coordinates the
administration, monitoring, auditing, operation, and
deployment of all applications, services, integration
adapters, and any other resources.
OutSystems Integration Studio is an integration tool
that enables the extension of OutSystems Service
Studio through the creation of custom adapters to
integrate any class of APIs, databases, or enterprise
application platforms.
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
Using the OutSystems Platform, you will no longer
need to maintain your application as a set of assorted
files, which are hard to modify and track, written in
different languages and requiring complex deployment
instructions. Any application definition coming out of
OutSystems Service Studio will include all the
definitions for the user interface, data model, business
logic, scheduled processes, web services, and the
required integration adapters. During “1-Click
Publishing”, these definitions are used to track,
monitor, and automate changes made to any layer of
the application, and to generate and deploy the target
running applications.
Easy to Get Started
Building applications with OutSystems Service Studio is
so easy and intuitive that new developers can start
being productive and participating in projects with no
more than 2 days of training. Developers will need basic
programming and data modeling skills as well as some
understanding of how a web-based application works.
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Of course, seasoned developers will be able to start
much more easily and will also experience huge
productivity gains.
Java. Again, such adapters will be available as building
blocks from Service Studio, side by side with all other
standard Platform components.
Easy Knowledge Transfer
The OutSystems Service Studio provides the right blend
of common sense visual tools, which will rapidly enable
anyone within your development organization to open,
browse, read, understand, modify, and redeploy any
application definition for testing or production use in
minutes.
Web services and wizards simplify integration with existing systems.
Painless Maintenance and Evolution
Drag'n'drop visual elements to compose business rules
Ready to Adapt, Integrate, and Extend
By combining powerful discovery and code generation
technology and a mix of intuitive visual tools and
wizards, the OutSystems Platform gives systems
integrators a quick way to create their own integration
adapters to connect OutSystems applications with any
class of middleware, database, or API. For application
developers working on end-user functionality, Service
Studio offers visual tools to assemble any existing
integration adapter as if it was a built-in building block
of your application.
Native Web Services
OutSystems Service Studio offers application
developers the ability to consume and expose standard
Web Services using simple, intuitive, and codeless
tools. As you move forward, you will foster the
adoption of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
within your organization.
Customizable & Extendable
OutSystems Integration Studio gives you flexible code
generation capability, allowing you to create your own
integration and extension adapters using the
technology of your choice, either Microsoft .NET or
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
What do you do when you need to change your
applications? Don't be afraid, embrace change! The
OutSystems Platform offers you a set of collaboration,
automation, and productivity tools that enable you to
become agile and move forward with new business
requirements as they come.
Centralized Collaboration of Multiple Developers
Plug in more application developers to your project and
you will get instant collaboration. First, they will have
access to a list of available services and adapters they
can use to build their own services and applications.
Second, they will get instant access to a version control
repository where they can find everything they need to
start working on an ongoing project. Third, when they
start working on and testing their work, they get a
centralized sandbox for personal use. Finally, whenever
relevant changes are found in the version repository,
every developer is notified and is invited to visually
review and accept changes made by others. The
OutSystems Platform's integrated features make it
easier to adopt Agile Methodologies to application
development. All a developer needs is Service Studio
installed in her or his desktop.
Automatic Dependency Checking
Whenever you modify a business or data service,
OutSystems Service Studio promptly displays a set of
notifications to guide and automate the process of
updating all related business services, data, and user
interface elements that use the modified service.
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service, or integration adapter. Managed system
settings allow you to control what each of your
developers, managers, and system administrators will
be able to browse and modify when they log in from
Service Center or even Service Studio.
Moreover, you can control more advanced deployment
configurations, such as servers, application
configurations, application packages, and much more
from one centralized management console.
Developers are shown detailed differences, allowing them to merge
their work using a fully visual utility.
Fast and Reliable Deployment
Make changes to your application and then make it
instantly available with “1-Click Publishing”. You will
notice that any change to an application that would
usually require a large amount of modification and
extensive testing, will now become painless. Any
inconsistencies will be pinpointed and even modified
directly by Service Studio during “1-Click Publishing”.
Integrated Management, Configuration,
Versioning, and Monitoring
Gone are the days of having to juggle a broad set of
tools to maintain applications' source code, services,
adapters, versions, and configuration files, and then
another set of tools to monitor, track, and evaluate the
performance of running applications. OutSystems
Service Center does it all for OutSystems applications
from a web-based console.
Centralized Services Repository
The OutSystems Platform streamlines the process of
maintaining and updating a repository of services,
applications, and adapters that can be easily browsed
by applications developers at any time to compose
their applications. Automatically, during “1-Click
Publishing” the OutSystems Platform keeps track of
every reusable service. Application Managers use
Service Center to manage the access rights to use, edit,
and execute each of the services.
Centralized Security and Configuration Management
Service Center enhances an application manager's
ability to manage and control all application resources
in a centralized repository. Create your configurations
to provide your developers and teams with the access
rights to open, change, or execute each application,
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
Service Center offers you a centralized management, versioning and
monitoring console for all your business applications
Application Architecture
The OutSystems Platform changes the way application
developers work together with business analysts to
rapidly create business applications. You can build
solutions that extend your existing systems and data,
or you can create a new business application from
scratch. In any case, you will take advantage of the
rapid development, integration, maintenance, and
deployment features of the OutSystems Platform.
Service-Oriented Development of Applications
In 1 month or less, you will get Composite Applications
that are Service-Oriented by design. Just follow the
drag'n'drop editors and tools presented by Service
Studio to visually compose Business Services, Data
Services, and Integration Adapters that otherwise
would take several months to glue together. Later, the
OutSystems Platform deployment engine will connect
your systems and keep track of their dependencies,
and your application architecture will grow organically,
always remaining easy-to-modify.
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You can use Service Studio to visually build and
maintain Composite Applications that deliver solutions
to business requirements by assembling reusable
Business and Data Services into new front-ends.
Similarly, you can use Service Studio to create your own
Business and Data Services by composing business
rules and data drawn from multiple sources with your
own application data. Using OutSystems Integration
Studio, you can also build and deploy custom
Integration Adapters to be used to create new
Composite Applications.
Structure your user's navigation experience.
User Interaction Flows
While developing applications with Service Studio you
will use user interactions flows to describe and keep
end-user navigation patterns across the application.
Application pages are represented, as well as
transitions and actions that take place upon user
interaction. In the User Interaction Flow diagrams you
can also easily grant or revoke the access rights of
multiple user profiles to each of the pages and
transitions.
Build your composite applications by assembling business services,
data services, and your own integration adapters.
Moreover, you can use Schedulers to configure the
asynchronous execution of Business Services, Data
Services, and Integration Adapters.
The “1-Click Publishing” process will perform the
required dependency checks and transform and deploy
all services within your applications according to the
appropriate design and deployment patterns.
Moreover, OutSystems Service Center provides the
necessary management and catalogue services for
Application Managers and IT Architects to keep and
develop their Service-Oriented Architecture.
Drag'n'Drop User Interface Design
OutSystems Service Studio lets you design and preview
the user interface of your applications using a powerful
WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. It
offers a wide set of visual elements that you can
drag'n'drop into web pages to retrieve, display, and
transform information at your discretion, based on
your end-user requirements.
Web, Mobile Web, and Email Interfaces
Visual Composition of Applications - A New
Way to Work
OutSystems Service Studio is fully based on visual tools
that promote a drag'n'drop style of composing
applications, rather that the traditional, time
consuming coding process. An intuitive Screen Editor,
user interaction maps, and a series of drag'n'drop
features allow you to easily connect the user interface
of your composite applications to independent
business, data, or integration services and adapters.
And since these applications will always be easy-tomodify, you will be able to improve them later based
on user feedback.
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
Create your Web, mobile and email screens in a WYSIWYG
drag'n'drop editor
OutSystems has made it easy to integrate tailored web,
mobile web, and email interfaces within the context of
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one business application. Whether your users require
mobile access to online information or regular
notifications by email, you will use the same
development environment and will reuse the exact
same Business and Data Services to serve your users.
Visual Design of Business Services
OutSystems has championed a common-sense
approach to the design of Business rules that is very
easy to learn, understand, and share with business
analysts, yet powerful enough to shape complex
business processes. These rules are designed using
familiar constructs like conditions, cycles, nested calls,
assignments, queries, and a wide range of other prepackaged or extended visual building blocks.
Enterprise Class Business Logic
The built-in building blocks and services will save you a
lot of work when turning your application into an
enterprise class system. These include Transaction
Handling, Auditing, Exception Handling, Excel File
Handling, Integrated Authentication, and User/Profile
Management.
Schedulers
The Schedulers feature allows you to program longlived batches and any type of asynchronous activities
for execution. Behind a simple configuration interface,
an advanced scheduling and throttling engine will drive
the execution and orchestration of your business
services. You can use schedulers to send periodic
reports, fire a consolidation process, synchronize data
from an external system regularly, or any other longlived batch processing activity.
Data Mapping and Composition
Designed to be a composition tool for heterogeneous
business services and data, OutSystems Service Studio
facilitates the whole pipeline of data handling,
transformation, and composition, whether you are
getting data from one system to send to another or are
mixing data from multiple data sources to present in a
unified user interface.
Data Services
OutSystems Service Studio empowers any class of
application designer to easily model and handle data
easily within your application. Data models are used to
drive the development of Business Services and
Composite Applications at a very fast pace.
Data Modeling
Following the visual modeling foundation of
OutSystems Service Studio, you can create, model, and
integrate persistent data repositories based on
standard relational databases. You can do this either by
creating new database entities or by reusing existing
data sources. In any case, your data can be easily
accessed from your business rules without resorting to
traditionally complex SQL statements.
Data Consistency, Tuning, and Refactoring
Whenever you use Service Studio to modify your data
model, it will check the consistency of all dependable
services and composite applications and issue
recommendations or change those automatically to
prevent data inconsistency or poor performance.
Drag'n'Drop rules, adapters, data, and services to build new business
services
Design and maintain your data models within your application.
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
Page 6 of 16
Integration, Security, and More
From security and authentication to integration and
language support, Service Studio includes a multitude
of features that let you make your application
complete, secure, and easy to develop.
entire application in one language, and then generate
and extract each text element for translation.
Integration
OutSystems Integration Studio includes a set of
integration tools that automate the process of creating
integration adapters and transforming them into
services that can be assembled using Service Studio as
you would any other business logic construct.
With the OutSystems Platform, the difficulties of
integrating are minimized with a straightforward
integration tool and native support for managed web
services. Take advantage of a built-in set of tools and
wizards to integrate functionality from multiple
systems into your applications without resorting to low
level API programming and extensive testing.
Security and Authentication
Extendable Architecture for Easy Integration
If certain pages in your application require
authentication (Active Directory, LDAP, or Custom) or
data encryption (SSL with or without certificates),
simply configure your application screens and your
applications will run in a secure environment without
programming and testing headaches.
Instead of developing proprietary technologies,
OutSystems has embraced widely adopted
technologies, such Web Services, .Net or Java
programming, and SQL Server or Oracle databases.
OutSystems integrates these robust technologies and
enhances them with a unified adapter development
framework that you can use to generate Integration
adapters that allow you to simply connect to existing
systems by discovering existing APIs and data tables.
These are wrapped around automatically generated
code that is open for customization and adaptation to
your reality.
Integration Adapters and Extensions
Application Level Permissions
You can also use Service Studio to define application
access rights for each of your user profiles. A powerful
and open authentication engine keeps track of and
controls every user's authorization levels, granting or
revoking access to specific business functions.
(1) You start your integration project using Integration Studio
together with Microsoft Visual Studio or Eclipse IDEs to generate and
fulfill stubs of code that implement the integration component to be
used in your application.
Set your user profiles access rights and enable authentication and/or
encryption using a graphical utility
Multilingual
Service Studio simplifies the creation of multilingual
applications by providing you with a series of tools to
generate, extract, and load multiple resource files to be
used at runtime to present data and content in multiple
languages to your users. You can freely develop your
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
(2) Once developed, your component APIs or data services become
available from Service Studio.
(3) Finally, when you publish the application, the Platform links the
adapter implementation (a set of .dll or .jar files) to the application
code as generated for the application and deploys everything at the
front-end servers just as it would any other component of your
application.
Once you create and publish the Integration Adapters,
they become available from Service Studio for use by
Page 7 of 16
application developers just like any other building
block. Accessing an external database, an SAP API, or
any other system becomes as simple as querying your
application database or invoking any of your own
services developed inside Service Studio.
As with your applications, you automatically get the
Dependency Checking and 1-Click Publishing. In the
execution environment, the adapters will seamlessly
execute together with all the generated code,
including connectivity, error handling, and data
transformation for interoperability.
Visually Consume and Expose Web Services
You don't need to be a Web Service guru to create your
own Web Services. Consuming and exposing
functionality as standard Web Services is a simple task
that requires no special skills. Just type in the address
of an available service or select the ones you want to
make available and that's it.
Custom Integration Adapters
You don't need to be an experienced System
Integrator to connect your SalesForce.com to your
Microsoft Dynamics or your Siebel to your SAP.
OutSystems Integration Studio automates a lot of the
coding for you. OutSystems customers have created
hundreds of integration adapters to connect multiple
ERPs, CRMs, external databases, EAIs, CMSs, GIS,
portals, and many other proprietary technologies using
OutSystems Integration Studio.
Wizard-Based Adapter Creation
If you already have your own Java, COM, or .NET client
APIs you can use OutSystems Integration Studio's
discovery wizards. These will create all the required
stubs of code. Finally, if you need to customize the
Adapter to your specific needs, Integration Studio will
pop-up Microsoft Visual Studio or Eclipse and let you
edit the implementation code.
Consume Existing Services Effortlessly
Whenever you need to integrate existing Web Services
from external systems, just enter the location of your
Web Service description (in standard WSDL - Web
Service Description Language). OutSystems Service
Studio will automatically read the Web Service contract
and transform the methods and data structures of the
Web Service into visual building blocks that you can use
directly inside your applications just as you would any
other service or API.
Turn Application Functionality into Web Services
Making your business functionality available to other
applications as standard web services is even simpler
than consuming third-party web services. Just select
and configure the services you want to expose and the
OutSystems Platform will take care of generating,
deploying, and publishing standard Web Services.
Follow Integration Studio's wizards to automatically generate all the
code you need to connect to your existing systems.
Reverse Engineer Existing Databases
You can also use wizards to discover existing SQL
Server or Oracle database tables that will be available
to create new applications, just as if they were created
by you using Service Studio. You can now combine
local and external data sources without requiring
complex integration projects.
Automatically Connect to SAP
If you need to create applications that take advantage
of existing data or functionality from SAP, OutSystems
Integration Studio brings you the possibility to create
your own integration adapters without coding at all.
You can mix together a series of existing services to produce very
complex application in minutes.
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
Page 8 of 16
SAP Adapter Creation Wizard
OutSystems Integration Studio supports the creation
of your own custom integration adapters to retrieve
and submit data to SAP. A simple and intuitive 4-step
wizard guides you through the process of identifying
the SAP BAPIs (Business APIs) you need for your
application. OutSystems Integration Studio
automatically generates the source code that connects
SAP to your application, mapping APIs and data types.
(1) With a single click, you upload the application design over the
internet;
(2) At the server, a Code Generator combines the application design
definitions with information available at the Services Repository and
configuration data to produce and optimize a Java or .NET
application and the corresponding database creation script;
(3) The Platform deployment engine installs the binaries of the
application over a cluster of application servers;
Follow the SAP wizard to create your own custom adapters.
Productivity
The OutSystems Platform delivers unprecedented
levels of productivity and maintainability that let you
create entire business applications in days or weeks,
instead of months. Enjoy the drag'n'drop style of
development, a fully automated deployment engine, an
interactive differences & merge tool, and a
groundbreaking visual debugger. All within a single
environment that does not require the installation of
complex servers and databases at every developer's
desktop.
Point-and-Click Productivity
When you need to deploy an application for testing or
even production purposes, OutSystems Service Studio
offers the “1-Click-Publishing” feature, which fully
streamlines the application deployment process,
replacing complex packaging, upgrading, and
distribution procedures with a single click. “1-ClickPublishing” generates and compiles the target code of
the application, deploys it in every front-end server,
and updates the required databases in a single step.
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
(4) The deployment engine applies an upgrade script to the
database;
During the execution of “1-Click Publishing” a lot of
automation takes place, from code generation and
service dependencies checking to version storage,
application, installation, and even database upgrading.
Deploy New Versions in Seconds
Such an automated build and deployment process
enables the changes made to an application to be
published in production (or pre-production) in seconds.
Changes to the data model, user interface, and data
update scripts, as well as verification tests, are done
automatically with a single click.
Versioning, Upgrading, and Managing
Configurations
OutSystems Service Center integrates all configuration
and versioning information about each application.
Instead of imposing additional tools and servers and
asking developers to use them regularly, you get your
applications stored in Service Center's version
repository regularly upon “1-Click Publishing”. As an
Application Manager or System Administrator, you can
use Service Center to decide which version of your
application must be running in your production
environment.
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Upgrade and Rollback Applications in Seconds
In the event that you receive an update or new version
of an application to put into production, you just need
to upload it from Service Center and trigger the
deployment of that new version. On the other hand, if
you decide to rollback your application to a previous
version, just browse the list of existing versions and
press the Publish button. The Deployment engine will
redeploy that version of the application. In any case,
it's a matter of seconds to have the right version of
your application running in your production
environment.
Rollback any of your running applications to a previous version with a
single click.
Centralized Access Control Management
real database, without interfering with your
teammates' work.
Visual Differences & Merge
Just pick any two versions of your application and check their
differences using the Visual Differences & Merge utility.
OutSystems Service Center includes access control
management of all application resources, providing
flexible low-level permissions that allow you to assign
any developer or group of developers the right to use,
modify, or even publish a given application. This helps
you to manage large teams of developers with
different profiles and administrative privileges, as well
as clearly separate the access to the Platform's Build &
Change Services from the Platform's Execution
Environment.
When you decide to publish your own version of an
application, you may receive notifications about what
has been changed by others and what service
dependencies are no longer up-to-date. With that
information in hand, you can take advantage of a visual
difference and merge tool that is used to rapidly
combine everyone's changes. This takes advantage of
the Platform's version control service, meaning that
the information about what has changed is obtained
directly from the central version control service.
Continuous Developer Collaboration
Seamless Testing & Tuning
The OutSystems Platform includes several features that
promote constant collaboration across large teams of
application developers working together on multiple
business functions. These include version control,
modification alerts, and even debugging. Although you
will conduct all of those activities from OutSystems
Service Studio, all runtime activity will be held and
controlled in a centralized sandbox environment. You
can plug new developers into your project without
requiring each of them to install a complete set of tools
and servers in their desktop.
Remote Personal and Team Sandboxes
Each application designer uses a personal server-based
sandbox to test his own work before publishing to the
centralized version repository that contains the
contribution of every team member. A single click is all
it takes to create a completely separate runtime
environment to test your work in a server, accessing a
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
OutSystems Service Studio makes it easy to test and
debug your applications. A Visual Debugger displays
insight information about your application's behavior,
step-by-step, over the internet. As you move forward
with the development of your application, you can get
instant simulation of query execution results and finally
get access to runtime performance reports and tuning
suggestions that will let you improve your application's
reliability and performance.
Distributed Visual Debugger
OutSystems Service Studio introduces a breakthrough
distributed visual debugger, which allows you to not
only follow the step-by-step execution of your
application for the purpose of identifying and
correcting errors, but also allows you to easily
understand the business intent of your application as it
executes, as well as pinpoint and correct any existing
errors. And you can even do it over-the-internet or over
a production environment without interfering with
other users interacting with your application.
Page 10 of 16
they were part of Service Studio by default. With a few
clicks, without leaving your development environment,
you can set up a series of services and rapidly compose
a new application that orchestrates them.
Browse and pick the services you need to build your application
Follow, step-by-step, the execution of your application over the
internet
Design-Time Query Testing
Even prior to testing and debugging your application,
you might want to simulate the result of the calculation
of one specific database query, without even testing
the surrounding business logic. Just click the “Test”
button in your query editor and you will get live data
from your database, allowing you to check whether
you wrote the right query or have the required data for
testing.
Integrated Performance Tuning Reports
Once you put any application into production, you will
get several performance reports from Service Center
that will give you valuable tuning and optimization
information for your applications. Moreover, you do
not even have to worry about enabling and developing
extra frameworks to take those measures. You get it by
default, without any extra work and without
introducing any overhead to your runtime
environment.
Service Reuse and Dependency Handling
The OutSystems Platform provides flexible and
powerful tools to help you share, reuse, and manage
services and data among applications. By using the
Add/Remove Reference utility built-in to Service Studio
you can browse all available services made available to
you in your platform installation and pick those you
need to build your application. From there on you can
drag'n'drop them into your application definition as if
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
Share UI, Logic, and Data as Services
As you move forward with application development,
you may decide to share specific items from your
applications for use in other applications, possibly by
other developers. Simply select those and mark them
as shared services. Once you do that, they immediately
get catalogued and are available to other developers.
Items of your application may include not only business
services but also user interface widgets and data
entities.
Service Dependency Coordination
Once you catalogue a new service, other developers
get notifications if the base implementation changes.
Again, you get instant collaboration and have your
development efforts coordinated from a centralized
service. In addition, it's rather easy to act upon
notifications. Service Studio automates the process of
refactoring the invocation to the programming
interfaces of every service, allowing you to dependably
update all your applications with just a few clicks.
Centralized Services Management and Control
The OutSystems Platform is designed to let you scale
your ecosystem of applications as it grows in
complexity. In fact, as the number of services available
for reuse grows, you may want to decide who shall be
able to modify and update them, who is authorized to
use them inside applications, and even who is
authorized to update them. Application Managers and
Systems Administrators have the power to control such
access rights from Service Center, making sure you can
scale and operate your ecosystem of applications and
Page 11 of 16
take steps towards a pragmatic Service-Oriented
Architecture.
open and will integrate smoothly with your choice of
infrastructure technology.
Packaging and Staging Applications and
Services
Dual Stack Architecture - .NET or Java
The new Service Center console, available with
OutSystems Platform 4.0, gives you the possibility of
packaging sets of applications, services, and adapters
to be deployed altogether as an integrated business
solution.
As an application administrator, you can coordinate the
staging of one large release of your portal, made of
multiple business processes, and make sure that all
those applications are deployed as if they were a single
application, with no downtime and no integration
testing required.
OutSystems Service Studio is a codeless application
development environment that is fully technology
independent, which let's you transform every
application model into either a .NET or a Java
application depending on your choice. At the end, you
will always get a fully open, standard, yet well-behaved
implementation of your application.
Automated Packaging of Complex Business Solutions
Sets of applications, dependable services, and
integration components can be packaged by a single
click into a single file in the development or testing
environment.
You can decide whether to install the OutSystems
Platform over:
(a) a Microsoft .NET Framework and Windows Server
2003 or;
(b) on a Java Application Server running on Linux.
Configure your solutions out of multiple applications. Download and
publish groups of application as if they were just one.
1-Click Staging of Complex Business Solutions
Once packaged and downloaded, an application or a
set of services can be easily uploaded to a production
environment. The OutSystems Platform orchestrates
the complete deployment of the several services
included and their dependencies.
Every server side service and component is available to
run on top of the selected application server platform.
The OutSystems Platform deployment engine will
generate and deploy your applications using the widely
known and accepted ASP.NET and C# or JSF and Java
frameworks.
Non Proprietary Technology
This dual-stack architecture allows you to choose which
installation best suits your business requirements now,
and lets you easily migrate it to another technology if
needed in the future. If you are an ISV, you have a
unique chance to build your value added solutions and
deploy for multiple customers with different
technology choices.
For IT architects, rationalizing the organization's
infrastructure technology portfolio is critical to
reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The
OutSystems Platform includes a unique deployment
engine able to generate and deploy both .NET and Java
based applications. These target applications are fully
Choice of Database Engines
You may also decide to use an Oracle or Microsoft SQL
Server database server to support your applications.
Again, you may decide to deploy your application in
either of the supported databases. In either case, you
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
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can integrate data from any other external database
into your application.
High-Quality and Standard Target Applications
The OutSystems code generator optimizes every
building block in your application for optimal and wellbehaved execution, including query optimization
(complexity, number of retrieved rows, indexes), page
size, session state size and caching, among others. As
an IT Architect, you don't have to be worried about
applying sophisticated design patterns to every new
application under development. The code generator
uses and optimizes such patterns with every
application, regardless of the developer.
Standards Compliant
All the design patterns that are used by the
OutSystems Platform code generated take advantage
of open standards like ASP.NET, JSF, XML Web
services, cross-browser XHTML, JavaScript, XML, and
emerging “hot” technologies like AJAX. Immediately,
your applications will interoperate well with other
systems and stay in-line with your architectural
guidelines.
generated applications. In fact, if you choose not to use
the Platform, the generated applications can be
manually detached and deployed in another
environment without resorting to the OutSystems
Platform tools and services.
Readable Generated Code
At OutSystems, we take care of protecting your
investment in our technology. If you take a close look
at the source code generated by the OutSystems
Platform, you will notice that all modules of your
application are open, readable, and documented just as
if they were coded by hand.
No Vendor Lock-In
We don't want you to be locked into yet another
proprietary technology and think twice before using
our products just because you're afraid to become
locked-in. All applications created and maintained with
the OutSystems Platform can be extracted and
deployed on top of a standard Java or .NET application
server without using any of the built-in deployment
engines.
Develop once, deploy everywhere.
Constantly Adapt to New Technologies and Trends
Web services, AJAX, .NET, Linux, Windows, or Oracle.
Which product or organization will come out next with
new standards and upgrades? Using a technology
independent platform also means that technology
updates can be faster. The OutSystems Platform
evolves pragmatically whenever we can help our
customers to improve their delivery options and
standards compliance. Once you get a new version of
the OutSystems Platform, you always get new
deployment options, from operating systems and
database versions to new architectural standards.
Designed for Detaching
Unlike proprietary technologies and closed
frameworks, the OutSystems Platform generates
optimized open source code and doesn't require any
runtime engines or interpreters to operate the
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
Readable target code in C# or Java
Scalability and Performance
The OutSystems Platform is designed to scale as your
applications grow more complex. In fact, it grows
smoothly by just adding additional servers to your
execution environment. You also get an array of
advanced configuration and monitoring features that
allow you to tackle scalability, security, and
performance issues, from a single management
console.
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Designed for Unlimited Horizontal Scalability
The OutSystems Platform is designed with a strong
focus on performance and scalability. Its architecture
supports a wide range of installation options, ranging
from departmental applications with few users to large
enterprise-wide deployments supporting upwards of 1
million users. To achieve this goal, the OutSystems
Platform distributed architecture supports load
balancing and removes single points of failure in the
execution environment.
Performance Reports
Performance issues are normally hard to detect and fix.
And because they normally appear only in production,
the consequences can be devastating. The OutSystems
Platform pinpoints performance issues in real-time, by
asynchronously tracking the execution times of all
queries, web service invocations, screen renderings,
and schedulers.
Browse runtime reports to understand how your applications
perform.
Design-Time Validation
Just configure more front-end servers and add them to your cluster.
All required applications are automatically installed and configured.
The OutSystems Platform distributed architecture
consists of (1) a deployment server that performs all
code generation, configuration, and versioning updates
and automatically deploys applications to several (2)
front-end servers that are accessed by end users via a
load balancer. Those front-end servers can be spread
across various networks (Internet, Intranet, and
Extranet).
Adding new front-end servers to your installation is a
simple installation and configuration process. Once you
plug a new server into your execution environment, all
your applications are automatically deployed, instantly.
And you get scheduler and asynchronous logging
services.
Performance & Reliability Management
The OutSystems Service Center management console
features a series of unique performance monitoring
and analysis tools that give you an overview of all the
services running at each server, as well as statistics
about the performance of every component of your
applications.
OutSystems Service Studio includes powerful
verification tests that ensure that your applications are
correctly designed even before testing them or moving
them to production. Design-Time validation reports
include a lot of information about potential errors,
performance bottlenecks, or dependency
inconsistencies.
Performance tips are issued to prevent scalability issues.
Code Containment and Optimization
All the code generated by the OutSystems Platform
enforces a series of rules and optimizations that make
sure your new application behaves correctly and avoids
scalability or reliability issues.
OutSystems code generators use the following rules
and optimizations:
Optimized page size - Reduces bandwidth
bottlenecks;
Database fetch size containment - Avoids
unnecessary network roundtrips and overload;
Database connection pool containment Avoids excessive use of operating system and
network resources;
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
Page 14 of 16
Adapter timeout containment - Eliminates the
risk of using custom coded components that
affect the performance of the applications;
Recursion containment - Reduces the
possibility of letting business rules execute
indefinitely;
Asynchronous logging - Ensures that no
logging activity will affect the core user and
business events;
Runtime Monitoring
If you are an application manager or system
administrator, you can also use Service Center to check
the runtime activity status of your application services
and take immediate action to recover or reconfigure
your system. If you already have your own monitoring
and administration system, you can easily integrate the
information provided by the OutSystems Platform to
get automatic notifications when problems occur.
Scheduler Throttling - Ensures that excessive
loads of badly programmed scheduled
activities do not take all the processing power;
Transactional Deployment - Ensures that your
applications are deployed correctly and that
you don't get incompatible versions of your
application components running side-by-side;
Multi-tenant data Isolation and containment Lets you operate multiple applications in
perfect data isolation.
High Availability, Fault Tolerance, and Instant
Installation
You don't need to be an experienced webmaster or
enterprise architect to set up your applications for high
availability and fault tolerance. With the intuitive
administrative interface of Service Center, you can
configure multiple front-end servers to support one
Platform installation.
Filter and review application activity logs from Service Center.
Runtime Auditing, Logging, and Reports
OutSystems Service Center includes a log monitoring
and browsing feature that you can use to understand
any application's misbehavior, error condition, or
performance data. You can also aggregate the same
data in consolidated reports to understand which
pages, queries, or web services are performing badly
and provide those reports to application developers so
that they can tune their applications from live data.
Once the servers are configured, the OutSystems
Platform deployment engine will deploy every
application in each of your servers. No user data or
session information is stored locally in one single
server. This allows you to distribute any user request to
any of the servers, increasing the redundancy and
availability of your system. In case of a catastrophic
failure, you can safely replace any of the servers. Once
you configure a new server, the OutSystems Platform
deployment engine automatically starts the installation
of the applications to process more user requests.
Strong Security & Traceability
Once you deploy your applications, you get instant
security and auditing. Every OutSystems application is
created and configured to generate logging upon
relevant events like performance warnings, unhandled
application errors, or unexpected/unauthenticated user
access. With the OutSystems Service Center, you can
follow the application execution logs online or extract
aggregated reports to decide on changes to your
applications.
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
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OutSystems US
OutSystems UK
OutSystems Benelux
303 Twin Dolphin Drive - 6th Floor
Redwood City - California 94065, USA
Tel: +1 650-632-4299
[email protected]
Castle Hill
Windsor SL4 1PD, UK
Tel: +44 1753 839 499
Fax: +44 1753 831 113
[email protected]
Planetenbaan 16
3606 AK Maarssen, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0) 346 583 000
Fax: +31 (0) 346 590 201
[email protected]
OutSystems Spain
OutSystems Portugal
Intionis, C/ Cedaceros 11, 2ª Planta
28014 Madrid, España
Tel: +34 91 369 00 59
Fax: +34 91 369 00 56
[email protected]
Rua Central Park 6, 2A
2795-242, Linda-a-Velha, Portugal
Tel: +351 21 4153730
Fax: +351 21 4153731
[email protected]
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems – All rights reserved.
www.outsystems.com
[email protected]
© 2001 - 2007 OutSystems
All rights reserved.
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