CA Plex: what is it?

CA Plex Helps Deliver SOA-based, Web-based and Traditional Multiplatform Applications Quickly

CA Plex Helps You Develop Business Applications in Multiple IT Environments — On Time and Within Budget

CA Plex provides key benefits to assist you in bridging the gap between business operations and IT. By speeding development time, simplifying system maintenance and insulating your developers from low-level technology specifications, CA Plex can enable your organization to meet its ultimate business goals of increasing profits while improving customer service.

Core business applications in today’s fast-moving world come with multiple challenges, both technical and non-technical. These business systems should not only reflect the organization’s main business strategy, but should also be flexible enough to adapt to inevitable changes.

Attaining this can be difficult, especially when mergers, acquisitions and partnerships require that key applications must integrate across multiple platforms and computing environments. Since there is not one universal platform, application integration remains a challenge.

Service-oriented Architectures help address these issues, but the ability of organizations to readily take advantage of emerging technology while meeting the ongoing requirements of increased productivity, enhanced quality and reduced costs is still a challenge. For many, it may involve implementing entirely new development projects, providing additional training for existing development teams or finding additional resources, which can be scarce and expensive.

This could drain most IT budgets quickly. To compound the problem, many development projects are complete or partial failures, from both technical and budgetary standpoints. In light of these issues, adopting new technologies or SOA-based architectures while maintaining
acceptable levels of productivity may seem impossible With CA Plex, organizations are able to meet these ongoing challenges. As applications are designed and built in a Windows environment and deployed to a variety of target platforms, developers do not have to know low-level coding details of Java/J2EE, Windows/.NET or IBM Power Systems/IBM i, nor do they need to be expert web developers. CA

Plex offers a complete, end-to-end solution in a single development environment, using a single set of developer skills.

Key Capabilities

CA Plex offers a Windows-based visual IDE, complete with GUI screen designers, a platformneutral action language editor, a diagrammer, and impact analysis tools. Additionally, CA Plex has a multiple developer repository with built-in configuration management for storing design models across multiple versions, languages and platforms. CA Plex also features code generators that automatically create 100 percent of the native code required, together with HTML and GUI clients, 5250 host screens, server programs and database objects.

The integrated modeling environment contributes toward a development methodology that can be easily understood by both business and technical people. It is considered an Architected Rapid Application Develoment tool (ARAD) that is focused on three key elements:
Models, Patterns and Generators, all of which contribute to developer productivity.

ACCELERATED DEVELOPMENT CA Plex business objects (or patterns) are incorporated into application designs simply by dragging and dropping, eliminating the need for recoding repeated elements of applications. This approach saves considerable time and cost.

TECHNOLOGY INSULATION Based on the design model, CA Plex generates 100 percent of the native code required for entire applications — client code, server code and database objects. Developers are not required to know technical details of specific programming languages such as C#, Java or RPG IV.

SIMPLIFIED APPLICATION MAINTENANCE With CA Plex, the time and costs of application maintenance are significantly reduced. The appropriate changes are simply made in the model; then the application is regenerated and redeployed within the CA Plex environment. The
performance and availability of CA Plex applications can be managed in production with CA Wily Introscope®.

FOCUS ON TEAM DEVELOPMENT Multiple developers can work on the same project simultaneously with metadata being stored in a central repository. The repository can be accessed via an API as well as an XML Import/Export capability. This open repository enables a variety of third-party add-ons, such as a UML bridge and metadata exchange with tools such as CA ERwin and CA 2E.

STREAMLINED APPLICATION INTEGRATION In building applications, CA Plex can utilize new or existing database schema. A variety of techniques are provided to enable integration with other CA products and third-party tools. This helps make use of existing development projects and provides additional functionality where applicable.

Technical Features

MODEL-BASED DEVELOPMENT Modeling enables you to design applications with business requirements in mind rather than technical specifications. Changes in business requirements can be easily incorporated by making a change in the design model and then regenerating the parts of the application that are affected by the change.

PATTERNS Patterns are business objects that provide solutions to many of the recurring problems that arise in software systems. The use of patterns is widely recognized as an important technique for improving the software development process. What makes CA Plex  special is its ability to encode and reuse patterns via an object-oriented inheritance engine. The product includes hundreds of predesigned and pretested patterns that are grouped into libraries. By using these patterns, you eliminate the need to recode repeated elements of an application.

DYNAMIC INHERITANCE AND CUSTOMIZATION Patterns in CA Plex are not hard-coded; you can modify them, create your own and acquire additional ones from third parties. Any changes to a pattern are immediately applied to all instances throughout the design model.

NATIVE CODE GENERATORS The CA Plex base configuration includes code generators for Java, C#, C++, RPG III and RPG IV that can be deployed across multiple platforms. Each generator relies upon a runtime framework appropriate for the target platform. This approach reduces the amount of generated code required since common services are implemented within the runtime framework.

INDUSTRY STANDARD DATABASE SUPPORT Using standard APIs such as OLE DB, JDBC, ODBC and OCI, CA Plex supports a variety of databases including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and IBM DB2.

WEB CLIENT DEVELOPMENT AND SOA Additional technology patterns are available for the generation of AJAX-enabled Rich Internet Applications (RIA), SOAP/XML components for Service-oriented Applications, and the generation of HTML clients for browsers and mobile
device clients.

ENTERPRISE JAVA BEAN (EJB) SUPPORT CA Plex enables the full generation and deployment of EJB components for the J2EE platform. Business logic can be accessed by third-party systems running any of numerous environments.

BUILT-IN CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT Versioning facilities enable the repository to track changes to the application over time. Variations of application design information can be stored across various platforms.

APPLICATION INTEGRATION FACILITIES In building new applications, CA Plex can reverseengineer existing database schema and integrate with other CA products and third-party tools using built-in features such as XML Import/Export, .NET or COM Connectors and COM Import. Additional code using a number of programming languages (such as Visual Basic, Java, C++ or RPG) can also be manually integrated into the CA Plex application design.