Adaptive’s products (Adaptations)
are built on a strong technical foundation designed to provide world-class
enterprise-scalable capabilities in the collaborative management of
architecture and other enterprise models. Adaptive Foundation consists
of Adaptive Repository™, Adaptive Reference Model™ and
Adaptive Designer™.
The following diagram illustrates the architecture of
the Adaptive Foundation™ technology:
Adaptive’s products are fully server-based, with
only a web browser needed on the desktop1.
This dramatically reduces the costs of deployment, training and client
hardware requirements - it is just a matter of providing someone with
a URL, and it is just like using any other web site. It is important
to note that this is different from traditional static ‘web
publishing’: through the browser a user has full update, dynamic
visualization, access control and versioning capabilities.
The heart of the technology is Adaptive Repository™
which is the industry leading repository based on the Meta Object
Facility™ standard. Support of this standard means that Adaptive
Repository can automatically support any standard metamodel such as
UML® or CWM®, custom metamodels such as the Adaptive Reference
Model™ and moreover allow them to be extended and integrated;
and it can interchange with any tool supporting the XML-based XMI®
standard.
Adaptive has taken Adaptive Repository beyond the MOF
standard to add capabilities necessary for enterprise-wide repository
deployment and is proposing these extensions for the new version of
MOF.
For information storage, Adaptive Repository makes use
of industry standard relational databases1.
The repository exploits the chosen database in a very powerful and
flexible way that avoids the need for reorganization when the metamodels
are extended; and that only requires differences to be stored between
different versions of the same object. Communication with the database
is via the JDBC standard.
The Adaptive Server itself is hosted in an Application
Server conforming to the widely-supported Java Server Pages and Servlet
standards. This intercepts requests from the browser which are in
the form of URLs: in fact everything is accessible via its own URL
which provides a great deal of flexibility for linking from external
sources elsewhere on an intranet. The details of the objects are manipulated
internally using XML and then processed through XSL stylesheets to
make the information visible to the user in the context of defined
server-linked web pages (JSPs).
The requests are processed through a set of Views which
determine what information should be available about an object and
potentially some related objects: there is a great deal of power available
including multiple navigation paths, filtering, and recursive “bill-of-material”
structures. The views used are controlled by User role (there is a
separate level of control as to what specific objects can be accessed
or updated).
The JSPs and XSL stylesheets are generated automatically
by Adaptive Designer™: the use of such open and well-supported
technologies such as XML and XSL makes it very easy to customize and
extend the supplied adaptations still further.
The use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) - a W3C standard
for representing diagrams across the web that is based on describing
the diagrams using XML - allows high quality diagrams, showing complex
relationships, to be interactively viewed and interacted with: all
Adaptive diagrams are generated from live information, arranged using
a layout engine and support full panning and zooming. The XSL to control
these diagrams is automatically generated from Adaptive Designer™.
Adaptive Designer models the Views, Forms and Processes
that make up an adaptation or extensions to it. The development process
for Views is illustrated in the following diagram: this shows that
Designer is used to develop Views for a metamodel. The Views are imported
in XMI form into the Repository to be used in requests, and JSPs and
XSL stylesheets are automatically generated and deployed to the Application
Server in order to visualize the information. In this way, the Adaptive
Foundation technology is itself a good example of Model Driven Architecture®
with real code being generated from models. A final step allows the
Views to be further compiled so that they are evaluated within the
database itself.
Adaptive Designer communicates with the Server using
a web services interface, making use of Simple Object Access Protocol
(SOAP) and with interfaces defined in the standard Web Services Definition
Language (WSDL). This is also the prime means of integrating external
tools typically through import and export. The use of these web services
standards, together with an extensible architecture allowing for pre-
or post-processing of files, allows access from a wide variety of
tools and languages including Visual Basic and Java: in fact Adaptive
provides an Excel macro that allows import right from within an Excel
spreadsheet.
1 For
a current list of compatible external technology such as databases
and
application servers see System
Requirements |
