The Challenge of Desktop Automation

Today, more and more companies are maximizing their competitive edge by using desktop applications to automate a wide range of business functions. When information is shared among applications, additional efficiencies are realized, including reductions in paperwork, clerical tasks, and data entry procedures.

Over the past decade, PC software has helped companies automate important business functions not addressed by corporate IT systems. The need to share information among PC software and legacy systems has moved technology in the direction of client/server and "open" system interface standards. But outside of the applications contained within the Microsoft Office suite, achieving seamless systems integration at a reasonable cost has proven to be more difficult than most software developers care to admit.

Two major challenges exist.

First, to share information effectively, it is necessary to resolve the basic incompatibilities that exist among software programs, operating systems, hardware, and communication components. Industry standards provide some relief, but often fall short as vendors constantly try to differentiate themselves with new, "improved" technologies. Secondly, integration tools available within standard software packages do not always work, nor are they easily implemented, as advertised.

Clearly, companies need a tool that can easily and quickly integrate software applications to meet unique business requirements. TracerX is such a tool. TracerX provides a Windows-based development environment with simple, high-level tools for integrating applications.The TracerX runtime executes user-specific procedures, reacting to events while gathering, transforming, and distributing data among multiple systems and devices.

TracerX provides three important advantages:

TracerX adds integration "hooks" to your existing application.

Whether you need to move data among DOS or Windows application, Web servers, host systems, or other devices, TracerX can achieve seamless integration in a few simple steps. Because TracerX programs are small and easy to read, you can easily change procedures as your needs change, without having to resort to expensive and time-consuming custom programming.

TracerX adds "features" to your existing application.

TracerX is not simply middleware, it is "extensionware"; it extends the capabilities of standard software. Do you need to add a customized dialog box, database, or error-checking routines? Use TracerX. Do you need to perform mathematical calculations, logic functions, or send key strokes to other programs? Use TracerX. It complements the features within your application and helps you work the way you need to work.

TracerX attaches to popular software programs.

Kewill E Commerce has pre-established TracerX interfaces to many leading software programs, including shipping, compliance labeling, forms processing, data collection, and EDI translation products. TracerX picks up where industry standards leave off.

Challenges to Systems Integration

Today, open standards have created an "anything-is-possible" atmosphere. Businesses are invited to be very aggressive about combining new and old technologies to serve the needs of their organization. Users want "world class" solutions. Trading partners are encouraged to exchange information to drive costs out of their supply chains. While boardroom expectations about integrating systems are quite high, the view from the field is very different.

The real world contains new technologies that, in many cases, have barely been tested, specifications that are incomplete, and legacy systems that refuse to go away. Integrating new technology with new technology is challenging enough. Integrating new technology with old technology is often impossible. System integration efforts often result in cost overruns and fall short of expectations.

To avoid integration issues, IT professionals try to find alternative solutions in all of the usual places:

Alternative 1: Find the Holy Grail – the software package that does it all

Like the mainframe users of old, some companies try to find a single software product that meets all user requirements and avoid integration altogether. This truly is a challenge, given the unique characteristics of each user’s work flow and business environment.

The single-source alternative presents a spectrum of choices. At one end of the spectrum are off-the-shelf software packages. Developers at this end, eager to capture a larger share of the market, try to build enough features into their software package to appeal to the needs of a mass audience. While this type of software is often lower priced because of wider distribution, it misses the mark in terms of delivering a solution narrow enough to address a specific user’s needs.

At the other end of the spectrum is software that is more expensive because it is directed at meeting the unique requirements of a much narrower market, sometimes a single user. With this type of software there is a higher risk that the vendor will terminate support, having failed to generate enough interest in the market for a product oriented to one user.

Alternative 2: Find the most "flexible" software available

Realizing that no single vendor can deliver the perfect solution, a user will frequently employ the 80/20 rule. They narrow their range of software choices to the products that can deliver 80 percent of the features they need. In anticipation of the final 20%, software developers provide configuration utilities that allow an end user to change the default characteristics of the system. Unfortunately, these configuration utilities usually fall far short of meeting a user’s needs.

This setup utility approach also introduces crucial tradeoffs. The more extensive the range of possible configurations, the more bloated the software program. Additional software overhead impacts reliability and performance. In the stability vs. flexibility tradeoff, the user almost always loses on both counts.

Alternative 3: Ask the software vendor for custom programming

Setup utilities may narrow the choice of software to the final 10% of functionality. The competition among the remaining software vendors is even fiercer. Undeliverable promises are made. As the pressure to make the sale intensifies, software developers will often yield to pressure and customize their application. In doing so, the developer takes the software out of the mainstream, creating a unique product with an extremely narrow market.

Custom software requires a unique support structure, documentation procedure, and upgrade path. In practice, vendors seldom accommodate customized software. Customized software become "special" support cases. Ultimately, any issue that arises with custom software is suspect. Consequently, custom systems are often bypassed when new software upgrades are made available.

Alternative 4: Build in-house applications from the ground up

Instead of paying expensive customization costs, many users turn to in-house programmers to build an application from the ground up. The temptation to take this path is strong due to the availability of rapid application development tools and the existence of in-house personnel who have a better understanding of the business purposes an end-user is hoping to achieve. Unfortunately, this path presents difficulties and costs that are often greater than outsourcing custom development.

In-house development expertise and the technical resources are at an all time premium. IS departments are under siege, called upon by every segment of the company to maximize (and justify) the return on technology investments. Development priorities are often set by the "squeaky wheel", starting from the CEO down. Meeting individualized programming needs are low on the list of IS priorities.

Off the shelf development tools lessen the cost and time required to create new applications, but it is often difficult to build a production-quality application complete with all of the features that are readily available in time-tested, off-the-shelf packages. Long-term maintenance and support can be a problem. The original developer may leave the company. In many cases it is easier to re-create the application from scratch than attempt revisions.

Alternative 5: Aggregate features in the Windows environment

Users ultimately come to accept the fact that no one software package can provide all of the features necessary to meet all needs. Most software packages are strong in some areas and weak in others.

Microsoft Windows environment provides a platform where multiple software programs can run at the same time. While Windows provides users with the ability to run applications concurrently, it is hardly a "seamless" process. Moving from one application to another may require numerous keystrokes and still information may not be easily "shared".

Alternative 6: Use industry-standard interfaces

The computer industry has promoted the idea that as long as software complies with industry standard interfaces, software integration is relatively straightforward. Anyone who has ever tried to make two software programs (not developed by Microsoft) dynamically exchange information knows that it is not so easy. Even software programs complying with Microsoft automation objects, ODBC, or other integration standards require a fairly high level of technical expertise and support to achieve true integration.

Integration standards can’t guarantee a tight fit because software developers can’t anticipate exactly how their products will actually be used with other products. "Plug and play" standards may work well when integration involves a fairly predictable environment, but it is less realistic to expect trouble-free compatibility among components in more complex systems.

To make matters worse, no two developers implement industry standard facilities in exactly the same way. Software and operation system versions must remain synchronized in order to sustain trouble-free operation. Constant shifts in technology, changes in business direction, and management’s desire for completing the return on investments for legacy systems only make matters worse.

TracerX design philosophy

TracerX has achieved widespread acceptance as an application integration tool because it was created to address the business challenges described above. TracerX was designed for field level integrators needing rapid development tools for application integration solutions.

TracerX starts with the assumption that a core application contains reusable code (programming that contains the business rules and procedures that are central to a software package’s purpose and operation) that should be insulated from user-specific code ("customized" programming that changes from user to user). Separating reusable code from user-specific code insulates applications from the destabilizing influences of customized code. The purpose of TracerX is to deliver user-specific custom programming that can be modified and supported without affecting the reusable code.

TracerX as an Application Integration Tool

TracerX provides our software developers with the benefits of the reusable/user-specific code design philosophy. The TracerX environment allows systems integrators to develop, compile, and run user-specific TracerX programs that augment, but are separate from, the core application. In effect, TracerX "grafts" custom features, including integration procedures, on to standard software application.

Whether you are mapping data from a host system terminal session, serial device, ODBC, Internet web page, DDE server, or ASCII file, TracerX reduces complex integration tasks to two simple functions: Getfrom and Sendto. TracerX shields the developer and treats all data sources as "hosts". TracerX provides a common interface that can map "anything to anything".

TracerX features a Windows-based development system, a full-function language, compiler, and runtime engine. Unlike many high-level development systems running, TracerX is highly efficient and transportable. It does not require installation of the entire development system to run. The run-time executable can be loaded from a single diskette. The entire development system consists of a single executable file.

TracerX’s powerful connectivity functions allow you to transform, condition, and transport data to and from up to 9 concurrent "host" applications.

TracerX provides a wide variety of connectivity options to
facilitate the exchange of data among multiple, disparate application.

How do TracerX programs run?

TracerX programs can be launched independently or directly from a software application. TracerX can also run in an automated fashion, monitoring and reacting to events occurring at either the client or server.

For example, suppose a user needs to transfer consignee name and address from an AS/400 order inquiry screen to a PC-based shipment processing application. TracerX can launch a 5250 terminal emulation session using an interface to Rumba, automatically capture data from the AS/400 screen, and send the data to Clippership, Kewill’s multi-carrier shipping system software. TracerX can then return carrier rate information from Clippership to the AS/400 screen through Rumba.

Using the example described above, in addition to "screen scraping" between Rumba and Clippership, TracerX could easily integrate compliance labeling to the shipment system application by launching a third host session to a labeling application.

Additional host sessions could activate EDI transmissions, shipment confirmations over the Internet, or serial data transmissions to a conveyor controller. To the end-user, the integration is seamless and transparent. To the IS professional, it’s one less thing to worry about.

Many software vendors have created interfaces within their products that contain TracerX ‘triggers’, calling TracerX programs at strategic points in the operation of the software. When TracerX programs are launched, it appears to the user as though the core software application executed the program itself.

TracerX development system

TracerX programs tend to be very small and easy to read. Integration tasks that would otherwise require thousands of lines of low-level code can be accomplished in a few lines of TracerX code. The result is integration that can be easily supported and modified, without getting lost in indecipherable source code.

Traditionally, production quality integration is achieved with low level programming in a language like C/C++. Development is often slow and tedious. TracerX’s high level language exerts low level control over a wide variety of industry standard integration tools, operating systems handles, and communication functions.

For example, accessing a field from an IBM AS/400 5250 emulation screen requires only a single line of code.

The TracerX development system includes the following features:

Development tools

Editor includes familiar, easy to use interface
Graphical wizards and tools to simplify and speed up development process
Pull down menus, scroll lists, keyboard shortcuts, and standard Windows functions like Copy, Cut, & Paste
Xbase-style syntax
Functions
String manipulation
Logical comparisons
Variable assignments
Create rules, including "while" loops, "if/else" logic, "and", & "or" constructs
Error-checking
Help system
Compiler
Access system date and time
DBF database engine
Build customized Windows user interfaces, including dialog boxes complete with buttons, text, data entry fields, frames, etc.

Generic integration tools

Access operating system facilities including DDE, DLL, and ODBC to build interfaces to other applications
Implement communication procedures to a wide range of devices and systems using serial port, parallel port, and TCP/IP socket level controls
Automate keyboard entry in multiple Windows applications with macro scripts
Read and write data to ASCII or Windows INI files
Control Windows clipboard facilities
Capture data from DOS program screens running in Windows sessions
Application interfaces
Internet browsers - use pre-built interfaces to Netscape and other internet-compatible programs to map data to and from HTML pages
Terminal emulators - scrape mini & mainframe computer screens with a single line of code. Send data to and from 5250, VT220, and other terminal screens
EDI translator - map data into EDI X-12 compatible formats procedures
Shipping & mailing systems - exchange data with programs designed to weigh, rate, and generate carrier documentation
Label designer & generator - feed data into labeling systems to automate compliant labeling tasks
International forms management - eliminate manual international forms generation with pre-defined interface
Tracking systems - implement automated material and mail tracking systems with transaction processing system "hooks"

Conclusion

TracerX helps businesses avoid the problems normally associated with integrating applications and delivers the following benefits:

End-user benefits

Reduce customization costs and support
Improve productivity by integrating new applications with corporate legacy systems
Improve productivity by adding new features to standard applications
Improve productivity by automating keyboard control across multiple applications
Improve productivity with fast, trouble-free execution
Improve reliability by leaving standard software applications intact
Reduce errors by adding TracerX’s IF, ELSE, and WHILE logic to business functions
Reduce the risk of losing long-term support of standard systems

If you would like to learn more about our solutions, please contact us.

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