Concepts

Overview

Fire is a complete suite of development tools providing a development environment for the deployment of applications across a Local Area Network (LAN) or the Internet/Intranet.

Why Fire ?

There are several key problems in enterprise organizations that the Fire solution addresses. These solutions enable advanced performance of databases and dynamic applications for Internet Client/Server deployment.

High Cost of Configuring Client PC's

Problem:

With the introduction of the Internet/Intranet and scalable database servers, the number of users accessing enterprise databases has multiplied many times over the past few years. This has resulted in high costs to load and configure every client PC.

Solution:

• Dynamic Application Download - Fire enables users to download applications dynamically from the web server and cache them locally on the client. With dynamic updating, high performance is realized, due to the client not having to download data every time a query is run. Significant maintenance cost savings result by not having to configure every client PC when an update occurs.
• Dynamic Configuration - Due to the dominance today of TCP/IP protocols across the Internet/Intranet, Fire customers will benefit by not having to incur the increasing costs of installing and configuring specialized client/server software.

Data Access

Problem:

In many organizations, data capture and data maintenance are handled by multiple end users or departmental staff. This makes database management more difficult and the final results less accurate. The goal of the IT organization is to reduce the risk of error by decreasing the number of times data is handled to one. This leads to an increased demand for resources.

Solution:

Client/Server-like Functionality - Fire fulfills the need to have client/server-like functionality across the Internet/Intranet. Fire allows IT professionals to gather, create, modify and delete data across the Internet/Intranet without having to supply massive hardware and database servers to the large user population.

Limited Internet/Intranet Reliability and Resources

Problem:

The unstable reliability of the Internet is a problem in traditional interaction and can cause data loss and a drop in productivity with less robust applications. In addition, available Internet bandwidth resources are tied up with users holding open a transaction which can also effect the system/application performance.

Solution:

Internet reliability with "Rollback" - With Fire, if an individual/application holds a transaction open, the transaction will time-out and send the user a message prompt. If there is no response to the message within a set period of time, the transaction will "rollback". If there is a disconnection or a time-out, the transaction will also "rollback".

Multiple Databases

Problem:

Today’s database access methods cannot handle multiple databases.

Solution:

Multiple Database Availability - Fire can handle multiple database connections. These can be either all client/server, Internet/Intranet-DB connect, or a combination.

Advantages and Benefits

Advantages

• Provide client/server functionality over the Internet
• Existing applications run unchanged over the Internet
• Support for database transactions over the Internet
• Support for compressed vectors over the Internet
• Federate multiple network, wide and local databases
• Dynamic application download
• Download of Fire/ActiveX plug-in one time
• Support for multiple platforms

Benefits

• Map download volume is reduced - Due to the graphics data being locally cached, selecting view controls such as zoom, pan, layer, etc... will result in new map downloads only if the user moves outside the locally cached area. While remaining in that area, only the object positions and details are transmitted over the web, resulting in faster performance, due to the demand on web transmissions being substantially smaller
• Permits downloading of compressed vector maps to local client cache for local object queries - The local map cache can include vector data such as lines, polygons and symbols, which are live objects in memory whose attributes or member values can be queried at the client side without necessarily referencing back to the web server
• Locally cached Dynamic objects as touchable objects - Because the client application is a true event-driven system, updates from the web server can be automatically shown as movements of specific objects on the client. Also, the map view can be set to automatically zoom and scroll to follow objects as they move over the local map cache
• Local cache graphics speed - Graphics performance to the web client is greatly increased by using a local map cache