Some definitions
The term “Agile” defines a project management approach that takes the opposite approach to traditional predictive and sequential approaches (V-cycle or waterfall). Agile development removes the traditional tunnel effect by giving more visibility, involving the client from the beginning to the end of the project and adopting an iterative and incremental mode. According to this approach, the need can not be fixed and, on the contrary, it can adapt to changes.
In fact, if the customer has correctly prioritized his need, he can accelerate the “time to market” if he considers that the product (partial) can go into production. It saves its budget and can reap a first return on investment. It also has the ability to change the priority of features that have not yet been developed.
Simplicité offers this flexibility and facilitates development according to an agile methodology that makes it possible to work more formally on the design of an application rather than its technical realization / execution. Just declare / set its need, tell the platform to load it to use it or see it live. This contribution therefore allows a greater reactivity to the change without never questioning the stability of the final deliverable.
“aPaaS” is an acronym for Gartner’s Platform-as-a-Service application. Gartner gives the following definition: “highly productive, easy to learn and use development environment that delivers business applications that are customizable, changeable, capable of implementing serious business functionality and, when deployed, offered with massive scalability, high-end enterprise-class (And beyond) performance and reliability, supporting massive amounts of data, all at SMB prices. ” Cloud services are segmented in 3 layers: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). While the first two markets are stabilizing, the PaaS market is still structuring. APaaS is an underlay of PaaS.
The aPaaS provides integrated development, deployment and management services, optimized for a cloud computing environment and supporting the delivery of the final application that is distributed as a service, known as SaaS. Simplicité is an example.
The business application is intended to be internal to the company: it is oriented to its business and its functioning for its employees, customers or partners, for example:
- Internal application: accounting software, HR / payroll management
- Commercial application: CRM, customer management, sales force
- Customer application: online sales site, logistics of delivery, management of catalogs / stocks
- etc.
When it comes to setting up a business application, a company is often confronted with two possibilities: the purchase of a software package or the realization of a customized application.
The purchase of software package
This approach works well when dealing with an application that orchestrates the process, non-strategic or non-competitive, based on norms or standards. This solution is not at all relevant when the job is company-specific, or that its strategy will bring it to differentiate itself from competitors or suggest new features. The packages are robust but generally inadequate to land changing needs with very low reactivity compared to the associated integration costs.
Specific development
The impediment to this approach lies in the difficulty of maintaining and evolving the application once deployed. Indeed, the technical code is coupled to the application’s business. Consequently, if the functional (business use) or technical (technological migration) need changes, it is generally necessary to modify all or part of the source code with all the risks of regressions that it entails, and to return to a cycle of specifications, developments And testing more and more.
In a competitive environment where it is necessary to be hyperactive and always more productive, an application totally adapted to the needs of the business and scalable is essential.
The Business Process Management (BPM) approach aims to analyze and model in a software the entirety of the business processes of the company. ” Who does what ? ” , ” With whom ? “When? ” , ” In which order ? “Are critical issues in identifying information flows and dialogue among all actors in the process.
The objective of this approach is to obtain a better overall view of all the company’s business processes and their interactions in order to be able to optimize them and, as far as possible, to automate them At most using business applications.
From a tooling point of view, a BPM system is generally composed of:
- Software for modeling actors and processes
- Of agents who allow to orchestrate them (execution, raising, alert, climbing …)
- Consoles to administer them,
- And dashboards to pilot and analyze them.
The complexity of implementing a BPM is exponential because it is linked to the level of urbanization of the information system as a whole, to its capacity for massive processing of activities along the water and in parallel to volumetry Data by activity to be exchanged / transformed, and the interoperability of heterogeneous software (language, version, technology, business rule, etc.) that change over time. It generally relies on communication / data transformation (ESB or ETL) middlewares to offset the complexity of cross-system integration.
Faced with such complexity, current BPM systems tend to address only a subset of business processes, with each application responsible for its data and processes.
Simplicité makes it possible to model and execute the processes for which it is responsible, and to simply interact with other systems.
Devops is a term derived from the contraction of the English words “development” and “operations”, often considered contradictory. This move is based on a reconciliation between development teams and operations teams to speed up the delivery and updating of applications.
The ultimate goal is to align the information system with the needs of the company.
The Simplicité platform simplifies all stages of the life of your business applications in accordance with pragmatic “DevOps” principles.
The Model Driven approach is a model-driven IT development approach. The model, as an abstraction from the real world, is the real communication tool between the craft and the designers. The model thus serves as a specification for all. Many advantages derive from this:
– business / technology decoupling
– business / technology decoupling
– scalability …
The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) consists in modeling the application in a language describing the needs (such as UML, BPEL), then transforming them into compilable and executable programs (generation Code or executable artefacts). The Model Driven Engeneering approach emerged in 2007/2008 as a continuation of the MDA approach. This provides a more structured view of the different aspects of the need to use DSML Domain Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs).
Simplicité is based on a completely innovative approach: the Model Execution Engine (MDE). It is a universal and agnostic engine offering generic principles of interpretation of the meta-model, which guarantees a total real-time bijection between the models and their interpretations at runtime.