When Intergen began developing applications for deployment on the Internet, Intranets and Extranets the technologies, development languages and infrastructure were in their infancy. We were forced to leave behind some of the structures and formalities that existed in our Client Server development methods when we entered the fast paced pioneering world of Internet Applications. Over the past years we have longed for the productivity and safety that comes with a robust development framework. We have constantly challenged tools and techniques available, looking for new ways to exploit them. The Traction Framework has evolved out of the work performed over those years to become what is now - a robust, extensible and maintainable framework for Internet Application development.
The Traction Framework exploits the latest Microsoft technologies, it is Windows DNA compliant, utilises SOAP messaging and is Web Service and .NET ready.
Traction Framework is more than a technology solution, it provides reusable objects, templates and techniques that enhance the productivity of developers. It creates a common approach that allows development team members to be replaced with a minimum of disruption and the team to scale through either horizontal or vertical partitioning of the development project.
Benefits include:
- Leverages the Intellectual Property of experienced Architects
- Applications easier to write, extend and maintain
- Common approach makes team changes easier
- Encourages peer code review
- Scale team development model either vertically or horizontally
- Promotes and facilitates rapid development methods
- Includes specialised tools to assist the development process
- Enforces separation of Presentation, Application, Business and Data Layers
- Reuse of components and template code
- Complex infrastructure problems have already been solved
- Flexible to cover all kinds of applications
- Extensible (fault tolerant) inter-component communication
- Reduces testing and retesting by compartmentalising changes
- Single data API with dictionary service
- All data manipulated and transported as XML
- Single DLL and Configuration file makes it easy to deploy
- Built entirely on Microsoft platform
- All messages are SOAP messages so Web Service and .NET ready
- Uses XSL for presentation layer
- SQL Server version independent
The Traction Framework is a third generation Framework designed to provide highly available, secure and scalable Internet applications.
It is strongly aligned to the Windows DNA Architecture. An important aspect of the DNA Architecture that is exploited was the concept of multiple layers or "tiers" (which is why architectures such as this are called "n-tier" architectures). Often with previous web-based development technologies the layers have been blurred to create an effect of an old-fashioned 2-tier architecture (i.e. client-server).
The Traction Framework provides clear separation of all tiers in the Windows DNA Architecture and ensures that the applications developed conform to this Architecture.
Overview
The core technologies of Traction are the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommended standards but with a strong bias towards Microsoft's implementation of these standards:
- XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
- XSL (eXtensible Style Language)
- SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)