Architecture

Introduction

Blueriq consists of the following components:

• Studio
• Runtime
• Publisher
• Composer

The purpose of the studio is to create and maintain an application. Creating an application consists of creating a workflow, the user interaction and the domain model. The studio typically runs on a development environment.

The goal of the runtime is to execute an application. The runtime is accessed via a browser. In the default configuration a user can specify which flow in which project should be started. It is also possible to define the language and the style. Each environment, e.g. development, test, acceptation and production (DTAP), runs its own runtime.

The publisher is responsible for publishing an application from one environment to another environment. It is the control room

With the composer it is possible to perform some changes to an existing application at runtime.

Interaction

The previously described components interact with each other as depicted in the next diagram. Note that the composer actually is a plugin which runs on the runtime.

An application which is created in studio can be directly tested in the runtime via the development plugin (typically only available on the develoment environment). The publisher can transfer it to a seperate database which contains all published models. Each runtime will check this database for the correct application and will execute it. By using the composer plugin it is possible to make some changes on the runtime in the application (which runs in studio).

Studio

A closer look at the studio shows that there are two layers internally:

• studio server
• studio client

The studio server provides the core functionality and is responsible for maintaining the studio repository. It also provides a management service, via Soap, which handles the connections to different components (publisher, development plugin on the runtime and the composer plugin on the runtime).

The interface elements (the studio screens) are handled by the client. This client is built with XBAP technology and runs only in Internet Explorer.

Both studio layers run on top of an ISS application server.

Key features of the studio:

• Revision control of elements
• External and internal libraries
• Multilingual elements
• Process modelling
• Creating dashboards

Runtime

The runtime runs on top of an application server, e.g. Tomcat, JBoss, Websphere or ISS. On the next level the SDK is available which contains the Blueriq engines. The webapp is located on the next layer, which handles all web interaction. On top of the stack a number of plugins are available, e.g. Dashboard, CMIS, which serve special functionality.

The runtime runs on java or .Net and is almost browser independent.

Key features of the runtime:

• todo

Publisher

Via the connection with studio, the publisher can pick up the actual studio application from the development environment and publish it to a central database. This central database can be accessed by the runtimes of different environments, e.g. test, acceptation or production environment. See also the following figure. This publisher is available in Java and .Net.

Key features of the publisher:

• 4 eyes principle
• Select a tag/revision to publish
• Well-organized overview

Composer

With the composer it is possible to edit parts in an application when running in runtime. For instance, the label of an attribute, the label of a button or a container name can be changed. In a lot of cases it is not desirable to do this change on a production environment. This is solved by using an extra environment called 'staging' (which is placed between the acceptance and production environment). On this environment the change is performed and can be put live by using the publisher.