In addition to providing a powerful and efficient architecture, General Interface makes it easy to develop and deploy applications. Industry-standard technology is used, so knowledge of existing technologies can be leveraged.
Ease of Deployment
The General Interface application framework and all General Interface applications are composed of JavaScript, XML, and CSS files. To deploy the environment and applications, you simply include a reference to these files in an HTML page that can be accessed by an end user from any HTTP or HTTPS server. The end user types the URL into a browser and starts using the General Interface application. To restrict and secure access to your application, use your existing mechanism for securing web page access.
Support for Industry Standards and Best Practices
General Interface uses industry standard and widely accepted technologies in both its underlying code (JavaScript, XML, and CSS) and overall architecture (Model-View-Controller and multi-tier design). Best-practice, server-side tasks are migrated to the browser to deliver the same successful results, maintainable code, and scalable performance. General Interface takes best-practice approaches from the server and implements them in the browser.
Scalable Architecture
The fastest page server simply cannot compete with locally served data. Load balancing, additional processors, page pre-caching, and any number of server-side enhancements are all ultimately short-term solutions. Rather than attempting to scale the server to meet the needs of the nth end user, consider a paradigm where each end user provides the resources for their own processing needs.
Unlike traditional server architectures, General Interface runs on the client, using the client CPU for data presentation and interaction. Even the General Interface foundation classes that facilitate this process are cached on the client. This means after a General Interface application is accessed, only raw data is requested from the server. Since no HTML needs to be transferred to the client, bandwidth is freed up to deliver more data to the end user more quickly. In addition, because presentation processes are now distributed to the client, servers no longer need to generate HTML for each connected user. With HTML generation processes no longer running on the server, the ratio of servers to end users is greatly improved.
Development Tools
You can develop General Interface client applications and components using General Interface Builder, a script authoring environment, or your favorite IDE. Once the General Interface runtime environment is loaded into an HTML page in the browser, you can directly interact with the General Interface GUI, data, and communication objects using JavaScript APIs.
General Interface Builder, a rapid deployment environment, is a visual authoring environment optimized for creating General Interface applications and can run either as a standalone tool or within the embedded browser module of your favorite IDE.
As a standalone development environment, General Interface Builder provides a powerful, rapid application assembly and scripting environment. You can drag and drop GUI components, connect to services, examine cached data, and implement the behaviors of the client application using JavaScript business logic and events.
When running General Interface Builder in conjunction with your favorite IDE, you have a complete end-to-end live development and testing environment with object, code, message, and error inspection.
Features