Engine Framework

The Engine framework is a database abstraction tool that provides a robust, standardised API (Application Programme Interface) for access to legacy databases. With this tool you can free the data locked up in your old legacy systems and provide the information to any application, written in any language required.

In every organisation, back-office applications need to be accessed from a wide variety of devices that are used by the staff of the organisation and its business partners, and in many cases by other individuals such as customers.

Many of these users connect to the organisation's applications from outside the corporate Intranet and Extranet. The devices have a wide range of form-factors, operating systems and user interfaces. The primary working context for users is their web-browsers, but these are highly varied in the way in which they interpret incoming streams of markup language, style-sheets and active code such as JavaScript.
Organisations need a way to achieve all of the following:

• communication between existing backend applications and all relevant user-devices, including desktops, laptops, handhelds and mobile phones
• provision of access to existing backend applications quickly, inexpensively and reliably
• quarantining of the backend applications, achieving access from all manner of remote device- types but without the need for changes to legacy systems
• release of new features quickly, inexpensively and reliably

PSARN’s Titan and Engine products enable this. Engine sit’s on top of an existing legacy database and accepts incoming requests through a standard API. It does this with no modification to the existing database, which ensures that legacy applications need no modification and can continue to access all the data they need.

Engine allows developers to specify a different model to be used to access legacy information. At the most basic level this allows tables and columns to be renamed (to rid your self of horrible legacy column names for instance) and at the most advanced allows you to completely re-engineer the underlying table structure. This can include merging two tables together, implying a new relationship between existing tables, treating a table as two separate entities, defining an entity that grabs information from a number of other areas. It also provides automatic global identifier’s even if the legacy system has no unique identifier itself. This enables offline applications to sync information back to the legacy database. All these changes do not change the underlying structure and are done on the fly. This ensures that legacy system’s can continue to work with the data they understand.