| Outline del sito | Juice™ takes information access to the next level by delivering any kind of online data into desktop applications like Microsoft Word and Excel — and keeping that information up-to-date, as it changes.
Using Juice™ business professionals gain broader access to information from corporate databases and portals, transaction processing systems, ERP / CRM systems, the World Wide Web, and even industry data services. Juice™ lets users quickly perform crucial business tasks like data analysis, reporting, and operational monitoring using the desktop applications they already know. The combination of wide-ranging data access along with real-time updates empowers Juice™ users to rapidly perform tasks that would otherwise require significant investment of time and money in custom solutions.
What’s more, Juice™ makes it simple to repurpose and reuse existing analytical models and reports, and to share documents that update automatically with colleagues and business partners. These capabilities enable powerful knowledge flows across the extended enterprise — even when information must be unified and analyzed across different IT systems. In short, Juice™ gives companies the ability to fully leverage their informational assets for better business results and offers a greater return on existing IT investments. |
| Contenuti del sito | Architecture Overview
The Juice™ Platform integrates with and provides access to distributed data sources directly from within desktop applications. This is accomplished using the Juice™ Client, which resides on an end-user's desktop, and the Juice™ Server, which supports multiple platforms and clustering for scalability and failover. Together, the Juice™ Client and Juice™ Server enable XML messaging-based communications over networks, while ensuring data security and transparently facilitating encryption, firewalls, and proxy servers.
The Juice™ Server
The Juice™ Server provides several core functions, which include connectivity, security, administration, logging, monitoring, and application services management. The existing application services include a central repository, where queries are saved and managed, and a variety of information-access data services, also known as Data Adaptors.
When the Juice™ Client sends a query in the form of an XML message to the Juice™ Server, the server routes the request to the appropriate data service. The function of the data service is to execute the query and return the requested data to the Juice™ Server in uniform XML. The server then routes the information back to the requesting client.
The Juice™ Server also includes a publish-and-subscribe engine. This engine interacts with the data services to monitor changing information and proactively passes information updates to subscribed clients. Lastly, the Juice™ Server exposes a Security Provider Interface (SPI) that enables integration with existing directory and security services.
The Juice™ Client
The Juice™ Client includes the base run-time, which enables messaging, communication, encryption, and security. The run-time is application independent and exposes APIs for submitting and receiving XML messages to the Juice™ Server. The Juice™ Client also includes application extenders that tightly integrate with Microsoft® Office to provide end users access to the data sources connected to the Juice™ Server.
The specific components of the Juice™ Client are:
- Base Run-Time Application independent layer that facilitates communication between the desktop and the Juice™ Server. Provides foundational services, including: authentication, message compression and encryption, and the JUDO APIs.
- JUDO API Set Asynchronous APIs for building information-driven applications. Enables rapid integration with existing applications or expedited development of new ones. Accessible from any COM-enabled programming language.
- Juice™ ODBC Driver Provides ODBC access to any data source connected to the Juice™ Server. Exposes all queries in the Juice™ library as a unified database (with each query appearing as a different table), thereby enabling joins across disjointed data sources.
- Application Extenders Juice™ Software built integration with existing desktop applications, like Microsoft® Word and Excel. These extenders, which includes the easy to use Juice™ Toolbar and Wizard, are responsible executing end user queries (whether immediate or subscribed), and for placing the results in documents. The Juice™ Toolbar is the end-user access point for all Juice™ features, including the Juice™ Wizard. The Juice™ Wizard provides end users with a uniform means for creating and editing Information Sources across different applications. Information Sources are the combination of an XML query and meta-data that allow users to easily retrieve information from any data source and return it to desktop applications and documents.
Non-Juice™ Clients / Standards-based Access to the Juice™ Server
In addition to the ODBC access personality listed above, the Juice™ Server can also be accessed through both SOAP and Internet browsers:
- Web-Services Access The Juice™ Server has the ability to publish its library of information sources / queries as a UDDI directory and to receive SOAP requests for the execution of those queries. This functionality enables the instant exposure of all data sources connected to the Juice™ Server as Web Services.
- Browser / HTML Access Juice™ queries can be imbedded into HTML pages and, with the help of a Java applet, content in those pages will update automatically without the viewer having to refresh the page. Juice™ Software has also developed an Application Extender for Microsoft® FrontPage that brings the simplicity of the Juice™ Wizard to creating dynamic web pages.
Data Adaptors
Out of the box, the Juice™ Server provides an ODBC/JDBC data adaptor for accessing databases, a JMS data adaptor for accessing messaging services, an LDAP adaptor for accessing directory services, a SOAP/UDDI adaptor for accessing Web Services, a HTTP-CSV adaptor for accessing flat-files, and an HTTP-DTD protocol and SDK for integrating with custom or non-standard data sources. Juice™ Software has also built custom adaptors for many financial service data feeds, like those provided by Bloomberg and Thomson.
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