What Is App Studio Maintain Data?

If your company is like most companies, you probably have several different computing systems in operation. For example, your accounting and payroll systems are running on a midrange UNIX computer, while your inventory system is running on an IBM mainframe. Most of the employees have personal computers on their desks and are accustomed to point-and-click interfaces.

With App Studio Maintain Data, you can develop applications with graphical front-ends that run on personal computers and access data on any computer system in your company.

Using the HTML canvas, you develop the application front-end (or user interface). Then, you develop the code that extracts data from your data sources and updates the data sources with new data.

At run time, end users start the application and access a Reporting Server where the data or procedures reside. The application extracts data from the data source, displays it for the end users to see, updates the data source with new information, and runs any procedures.

App Studio Maintain Data applications are called n-tier applications because they are capable of distributing processing over many platforms. N-tier applications offer the following advantages:

• You can access data on multiple platforms, forming relationships among disparate data sources.
• Your application logic runs on the machine most capable of performing it. For example, PCs are ideally suited for displaying the user interface of your application. On the other hand, MVS machines may not be capable of displaying pretty pictures, but they pack plenty of processing power. An App Studio Maintain Data application front-end runs on a PC, whereas the data access code can run on an MVS machine.
• You can speed up your applications. Procedures that access data can run on the platform where the data resides, ensuring that any aggregation or screening takes place immediately. This means that your application is not shipping large quantities of data across a network to be aggregated or screened somewhere else. Less network traffic means increased application speed.

The Reporting Server is available for every major operating system, MVS, UNIX, Windows, Open VMS, CICS, and VM/CMS. Using its data adapters, App Studio can access every major database management system, including Informix, Sybase, DB2, and Ingres. The Reporting Server can also run procedures written in another language. For example, COBOL, C, or other 3GL programs, CICS transactions, IMS transactions, RDBMS stored procedures, and FOCUS procedures.

Because Information Builders has already worked out the complications of different operating systems, communications protocols, and data access languages, the developer or end user does not need to worry about or even know where their data is coming from.

Using App Studio Maintain Data, you can:

• Easily develop web-based data maintenance applications with no prior knowledge of HTML, Java®, or complex 3GLs.
• Access and update data on every major operating system and every major database system (using the power of the Reporting Server).
• Access and update data from different platforms at the same time. For example, the inventory system on MVS and the accounting system on UNIX.
• Take advantage of the strengths of your computing systems while sidestepping the weaknesses by partitioning your application among the platforms that can support them.

For more information on how to use App Studio Maintain Data, work through App Studio Maintain Data Tutorial.

If you want to develop your own App Studio Maintain Data applications immediately, read Overview of Developing WebFOCUS Maintain Data Applications.