Agile Business Suite enables flexible and rapid development of runtime solutions by supporting deployment of both its own components and those developed with other tools together with the capability of multiple platform deployment.
Agile Business Suite Web Services support makes it possible to integrate applications among your suppliers, distributors, and partners. With Web Services, transactions are defined as self-describing services that can interact with other foreign applications to speed up everyday business-to-business processes. If you decide to adopt a Services Oriented Development of Applications (SODA), Agile Business Suite is the perfect tool.
Databases are optimized for each specific operating environment including SQL Server for the Windows operating systems.
The first release of Agile Business Suite runtime is targeted at the Windows COM+ environment. This brings a number of advantages including lightweight protocol adapters replacing previous runtime gateways. Because object pooling is available, protocol adapters can talk directly to the COM+ application. Although this is a significant advantage, the flexibility of COM+ applications is such that users can choose to bypass protocol adapters altogether by making COM calls directly from any COM aware language including a scripting language such as VBScript.
Because of the need to support a number of different protocols and transport layers, there are a number of different protocol adapters. Following is a list of the protocol adapters for this initial release of Agile Business Suite:
SOAP over HTTP (Web Services)
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a protocol that has a predominant role in XML development and Web Services. It plays a major role in Microsoft's next generation of Visual Studio, and is a basis of their .NET strategy.
SOAP over MSMQ
This protocol adapter provides SOAP over Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ).
HUB
HUB is a proprietary protocol that allows Agile Business Suite systems to communicate with each other and EAE systems.
NOF/OFF/USER/GLI
These are proprietary protocols used in Agile Business Suite applications.
RATL over TCP/IP
A protocol used by Component Enabler.
RATL over MSMQ
A feature of Component Enabler.
For Agile Business Suite users a protocol adapter is a Windows service, which appears in the Services, accessed from the Control Panel. Because of their nature, protocol adapters can be started and stopped independently of the rest of the system, and exist outside of the application.