Trilog Group Inc. this week rolled out an integrated J2EE development framework designed to let IBM Corp. Lotus Notes developers use their existing skills for J2EE development projects.
FlowBuilder 3.5 taps Web services technologies to reproduce the Domino development model and developer experience for open-standards platforms, according to Trilog officials
The goal of the framework is to let Domino developers use existing skills to build the same class of collaborative applications, but for newer IBM platforms including Workplace and WebSphere, according to David Hughes, Trilog’s vice-president of sales and marketing.
With FlowBuilder 3.5, developers don’t have to learn Java to work with the J2EE-based platforms, he said.
“We provide a bridge from the Domino world to the J2EE world for Domino developers and Domino solutions. [Domino organizations] need to migrate people and their skills. This enables them to leverage the skills of existing developers and avoid staff re-training and replacement classes,” said Hughes.
Leveraging a service oriented architecture, FlowBuilder 3.5 offers a visual representation of SOAP for a point-and-click integration of Web services. UDDI and WSDL are also supported.
“FlowBuilder is built upon a very visual component-oriented development and assembly model. In 3.5 we’ve extended this even further to let people integrate Web services into their applications in a very graphical way,” he said.
Additionally, FlowBuilder includes a new Eclipse plug-in that makes the framework available as an Eclipse perspective for Java developers. This lets Java developers seamlessly reuse FlowBuilder’s framework services and components, according to Trilog.