Thinkingcap technical issues

How does Thinkingcap integrate with J2EE and .NET?

26th April, 2004

J2EE and Microsoft .NET are the two dominant architectures for building custom applications; many organizations have both architectures in-house. Thinkingcap works successfully with each of these architectures separately and with mixed architectures. To achieve this, Thinkingcap provides a range of integration options:

at the data source level,

with web services

and at the client level.

The key difference between Thinkingcap and low level integration tools is that Thinkingcap can capture and work with the business models of another application either automatically or by design. These models are then maintained as part of the system at design and run-time. This ensures that Thinkingcap provides a clear and coherent solution right across an enterprise from the high level down.

Thinkingcap supports multiple data sources including the major RDMS vendors such as Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and Postgres. Any number of data sources can be handled simultaneously including transaction management. This allows for powerful integration opportunities for data reconciliation, reporting and warehousing using the Thinkingcap platform. For example, Thinkingcap Reporting has already been successfully used for a Europe-wide enterprise reporting system.

Thinkingcap supports Web services both as a provider and client. Any service within Thinkingcap can be made available as a web service without any further code. WSDL is used for describing any web services that have been made available from a Thinkingcap system. Conversely, web services can be consumed within any Thinkingcap solution. This allows integration both with J2EE and .NET systems and has already been successfully applied in the enterprise environment.

Thinkingcap can expose its domain model as Entity EJBs within an EJB Container. Here the advantages of the Thinkingcap Model Execution Architecture can be integrated at the component level. Currently the JBoss J2EE server is supported.

Thinkingcap can also provide outputs in the Microsoft Office format for reporting. Excel is a common output that has been deployed in Thinkingcap solutions where rich reporting is required.

In summary, Thinkingcap currently provides a number of enterprise integration solutions for J2EE and .NET. We are continually expanding these to ensure Thinkingcap is the ideal enterprise solution now and for the future.