InfoTrust Group has been a pioneer in information, data, content, and distribution management for the past 25 years. This is the result of InfoTrust’s steady policy of R&D and investment. Today, Infotrust has the most advanced solution for XML content management including XML differencing, XML authoring, and intelligent incremental publishing and distribution of large and complex SGML and XML content.

InfoTrust has developed five generations of products that have evolved on pace with technological advances and adapting customer requirements. As a result, InfoTrust has always stayed ahead of its competition in providing better value for its customers, making InfoTrust the leading player in its market.

Among InfoTrust’s technologies, TechSight/X® Framework is prominent. It is a coherent and rich base for InfoTrust products. InfoTrust now offers this advanced technology, TechSight/X Framework, to organizations that need and want to benefit from this powerful enabler to fast track their development of applications.

A comparative analysis indicates that TechSight/X Framework allows developers to produce applications and customizations 10 times faster than any other tool, framework, commercial third party software, or open source software for browser-based applications.

Additionally, thanks to the design of TechSight/X Framework and its inherent foundation, the subsequent iterations of its development perform even faster.

As a result, TechSight/X Framework provides two key benefits:

• Significantly reduces the cost of development
• Reduces time to market for development and use in production

TechSight/X Framework is built on the most advanced XML technology to create an innovative, highly flexible framework. It is designed for rapid development and easy customization of applications within the domains of InfoTrust. The interface is a Web page, wizard, and dialog box all rolled into one, but all with the appearance of a Web page. Its innovative design provides maximum usability for a more user-friendly and productive experience.

TechSight/X Framework is an application framework on which InfoTrust builds its solution offerings. TechSight/X Framework, which provides a base of common services on which applications are built, offers the benefits of extensibility, modularity, and reusability of both code and design to the company's applications, products, and solutions.

All the various definitions of framework center around the concept of structure. Structure plays an important role in software development. An enterprise solution contains many applications and systems, each with their own dependent components and complexities. Structure helps architects, developers, and others organize these parts into a few major ones that can be easily managed. A solution framework provides the software development team a structure and template that can be used as a baseline to build their applications and solutions. Developers can then build applications on top of the framework and reduce the development effort through reuse of code and designs provided in the framework.

The power of TechSight/X Framework lies in the layering and production of applications. These principles are built into the framework rather than an afterthought. TechSight/X Framework is not only comprised of the actual framework technologies (UI, rules, services, connectors), but also the tools, processes, and concepts surrounding the implementation.

There are five major benefits of using TechSight/X Framework:

These benefits are closely related to one another. One builds on the next.

• The keystone to TechSight/X Framework is the concept of modularity. This encapsulation of functionality shields developers from the complexities of the underlying system.
• This modularity allows for reuse, where applications can focus on solving the business issues for a particular solution, rather than the common complexities that exist in every solution. These common functionalities have already been solved for other applications, so developers should not have to focus on them for new applications.
• The abstraction of reusable modules requires these components to be maintained. Continuous improvement and evolution of components allows applications to stay current and not degrade over time. The modularity and encapsulation of a component ensures that it may be upgraded for maintainability without negatively impacting the rest of the framework or the applications built upon it.
• The components are at the core of TechSight/X Framework; however, they are also general to the Framework. TechSight/X Framework and its components exist to support the creation of applications. Critical to this endeavor is allowing the applications, components, and the actual framework to be extended to meet the needs of application developers. Extensibility provides developers, whether they are building new applications or enhancing the framework itself, to add the functionality they require by extension rather than reinvention.
• Finally, all of these components and the actual framework are simple enough to allow easy adoption by application developers. However, this simplicity is in its usage not in its implementation. TechSight/X Framework pushes the complexity, process flow, and so on down the framework stack so that developers are shielded from the implementation and do not need to concern themselves with these aspects for the majority of development.

An XML Document-Centric Approach

TechSight/X Framework is XML document-centric. Not only is the framework XML document-centric, but the applications which are built on the framework are as well. TechSight/X Framework and all of its components process XML documents in their natural state and do not force the documents into objects. InfoTrust’s products and solutions are predominantly XML document-centric and therefore are very suitable for development using TechSight/X Framework.

An XML document-centric approach is best implemented on architectures that rely on XML technologies, such as native databases, query languages, transformations, and other open source and third party tools that are established across the enterprise information infrastructure as the ideal way to move forward for optimal performance and reconfigurability.

Traditional XML processing models (DOM, SAX, JAXB, etc.) are designed around the notion of objects. The XML document is viewed as merely the serialization of the object. With this type of processing, applications are typically built around DOM nodes, strings, and objects. Rarely are the actual XML documents used in the application. This object-oriented approach for processing XML documents does not make sense for XML document-centric applications. The performance hit for the deserialization and serialization is not trivial. The repetitive creation of objects and the corresponding eventual garbage collection impacts both memory and CPU consumption. Additionally this requires complex programming to create, manipulate, and store XML.

A better approach is to keep XML as a document (or fragments of documents) and develop business logic around this document. With this document-centric model, the XML is the center around which everything else revolves. Processing the document in its native form enables the use of advanced XML tools that have evolved over the years. This is exactly what TechSight/X Framework does.

TechSight/X Framework embraces the full stack of XML technologies and tools. Since XML documents are the cornerstone of the Framework, we are able to exploit the power of XML by using the various X-Technologies. The following are used to some extent in the framework:

XML XHTML XSL XPath XLink

XPointer XQuery XML Catalogs XML Database XSD/RELAXNG

Finally, the architecture of TechSight/X Framework is constructed using a MVC design pattern. Successful use of this component pattern separates business logic from UI design considerations. Because of this separation, it is easier to customize the appearance of an application without affecting the underlying business rules, and vice versa; you can change the underlying business rules without affecting the appearance of the application. In MVC, the Model component refers to the data of the application; the View component corresponds to the features of the user interface such as text, check box items, and fields; and the Controller component manages the communication between the data and the business rules to manipulate data to and from the interface.