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Exclusive: Compuware Set for Major Release

UNIFACE Eight to focus on e-business process management.

Abstract

UNIFACE is Compuware's development environment for building, renewing, and integrating strategic applications. It focuses on the critical areas of e-commerce, EAI, and legacy renewal. UNIFACE Eight will become a key component of Compuware's e-business strategy because it will allow business analysts to model business processes and enable them to specify requirements and modify them at deployment time in response to fluid market conditions.

Full Text

eAI Journal can reveal that Compuware is preparing to release UNIFACE Eight, which will enable the automation and integration of business processes across companies. A formal announcement and availability are expected later in the year, but eAI Journal has been given an exclusive overview at the new solution.

One of the key features of UNIFACE Eight is its focus on business process automation. It will allow business analysts to model business processes and ensure that they are fully understood before the technology issues are addressed. Its process automation capabilities assign business tasks to people's roles within an organization and define the flow of the tasks executed by the business objects. At runtime, the business rules and the workflow of the application can be changed dynamically to optimize the process.

The UNIFACE solution also consists of a Component Construction Workbench. This model-driven environment creates presentation and business logic components that will run on a variety of hardware platforms utilizing many different technologies. It will support BizTalk, SOAP, XML, WAP, CORBA, COM, EJB, SAP, MQSeries, all major databases, all major hardware platforms, and all major technologies, allowing end-to-end integration of the supply-chain to be easily achieved.

The UNIFACE Integration Workbench allows components to be visually integrated into a new application. It manages the interaction between the components an application integration environment that facilitates reuse. At deployment time, XML is used to bridge UNIFACE and non-UNIFACE components so that applications can not only include UNIFACE components but also non-UNIFACE components, such as COM, CORBA, packaged ERP, Java, and legacy components.