Ultra thin client

If you are interested in an ultra thin client for the dotNET world, take a moment and introduce yourself to our software solution, vMach .NET. vMach provides a robust harnessing mechanism for the latest .NET technologies. As a developer and architect, you want to master a technology and make your efforts available to others.

The Adaptive Component Harness is the most powerful means to rapidly and reliably deploy new technologies and automatically integrate them to pre-adapted technologies. The vMach framework gathers strength every time you deploy it,
becoming the sum of all past successes, not just your most recent efforts.

Key Benefits
· Harness, deploy and expose technology to a greater
number of team developers
· Make technical capabilities available and automatically
interoperable
· Expose all capabilities as application building blocks,
capable of dynamically manufacturing a custom
application from existing capabilities.

vMach 4.0 is a fully mature metamorphic model allowing developers to deploy highly complex custom applications without regularly rebuilding the core software program.

The key to the vMach architecture is the capability to rapidly adapt new technologies into a common pool and provide a means to automatically activate and interoperate their behavior with previously adapted technologies.

vMach is an acronym for Virtual Metamorphic Adaptive Component Harness. It is both a concept and a real product, fueling a dynamic and high-speed approach to custom application development.

The concept is simple: a pool of programmable, adaptive components is activated on-demand in one or more computing environments.

An abstract, pattern-based controller activates the behavior between and within the entities. We've shown that pattern-based metadata can reduce application-level lines-of-code by a factor of 100:1 up to 1000:1.

The master structure holding these entities together is the Harness. The Harness dynamically snaps together components as structural and behavioral building blocks. Components know how to talk to each other in the harness, and each harness knows how to talk to other harnesses on the local machine or distributed machines. Each harness can play on or more combinations of roles, such as a client, service, proxy etc. Thus we can assign one harness to be a lightweight desktop client, another to be a workhorse database proxy/cache, another to be an EAI communications server, etc. In each case, it's the same harness software (vMach) behaving in different, dynamic roles.

On the client side, for example, a responsibility of the harness is to express screen-level presentations to the user. vMach has the unique ability to dynamically render and activate any Visual Basic .NET form without first compiling the form (*.vb) file. In fact, a developer can simply render the screen in .NET, save it to disk, and it's instantly available to the user.

This aspect has profound implications on delivering screens to end-users. We can configure multiple desktops to point to a common resource pool of .NET screens on a network. Each time we update the pool's content, it's instantly available to the user. In the Web Application Proof we proved that these same .NET screens can be placed on a web site, accessed by a vMach instance anywhere in the world, and provide a custom experience to the user.

Note that the harness, not the custom application, is running on the desktop. The application remains “virtual” from the moment it leaves its resource pool, wherever the pool might be located.

Additionally, multiple pools can be hosted in different parts of an enterprise, or on the web. One pool can contain content to direct vMach to another pool, creating a "virtual wiring" for multiple applications. Thus multiple, interoperable
applications can coexist in a common forum.

The vMach harness is self-contained and does not require ASP, IIS, Web Services or other infrastructure to support highly dynamic and complex applications. vMach's disk footprint is about 1MB of binary software, representing what is arguably the thinnest, most powerful computing architecture on the planet. For application deployment, it is the thinnest infrastructure.

It thus combines the passive nature of web-based application deployment with the active nature of local computing utilities. Developers delivering application solutions are no longer enslaved within the bubble of the browser's limited capabilities.

Historically, developers have migrated away from local computing architectures and into browser-based technologies for delivering user-facing applications. This has been to avoid a proliferation of custom programs on a local computing environment and all of the attendant maintenance headaches. This migration has often led to a sacrifice of user-centric functionality and a centralization of application operation. Thus we are limited as to what we can deliver and the delivery platform ultimately runs out of capacity. vMach eliminates these issues. No matter what the custom application, vMach will be the only computing mechanism installed in the user's local environment, and can broker any application with the appearance of a customized experience.

vMach can self-update with common Windows Installer "web deploy" capabilities. It thus installs at the utility level, not the custom application level.

vMach also balances the power of the local computing with server-side activities. vMach can perform all of the operations (database access, data manipulation, report generation, etc) typically offloaded to overworked servers. vMach can self-distribute its workload to multiple machines.

The fuel for this model is structural and behavioral metadata, discovered at run time rather than being hard-wired into the software. While it seems that this model might be slower than its hard-wired, compiled equivalent, it's actually quite a bit faster because it can optimize every aspect of structural instantiation rather than rest upon the language environment's defaults. It is also more stable,
easier to troubleshoot and maintain, and generally grows in strength and resilience for the duration of its lifetime.

A primary benefit of this model is the ability to drive all architectural successes into the core software, such that each new project is the sum of all past successes. Conversely, each prior application or project can automatically benefit from the future success of an unrelated project.

Thus vMach is the only platform and approach that enables 100% reuse of compiled software on each new project. While that's a bold claim, vMach has been delivering on it for years. See the proof yourself.

The best part is that we can model technology structures in familiar venues. We can model databases through ErWin or the equivalent. We can model, render and maintain screen layout and navigation through the Integrated Development Environments for Microsoft, Borland, even Visio or others. We can even access Visio UML to dynamically define object models, class hierarchies and data flow diagrams rather than
embedding their relationships in software.

vMach exercises a controlled startup from a given application's definition. Thus when loaded, it is automatically aware of the application's initial startup requirements. It can load a screen, perhaps run a batch script, or perform other application-level tasks based upon the instructions that it finds. This is an important distinction, because vMach discovers its application rather than having everything accounted for prior to going live.

The pattern-based metadata used to feed the Behavioral Controller are distillations of hundreds, even thousands of lines of optimized, precompiled software in the harness. Thus the Controller can activate enormously complex operations from a few simple lines of pattern-based metadata.

This concept means more than simply wrapping a given technology. It also means conforming a proprietary API to a common, more resilient interface definition. If each API conforms structurally and behaviorally through a common interface pattern, we have readied them to reliably communicate with one another with very little software intervention in between.

If you are interested in learning more about the vMach product or would like to try a 60-day evaluation copy of the software, please feel free to e-mail or call me at 214-415-6011. You can also visit our website at www.metamorphicsw.com.

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