Business Intelligence Application Development
Companies are investing millions of dollars in ERP solutions or have invested till date to improve the way they conduct their business. While ERP provides significant benefits organizations are finding that, in order to achieve critical decision making business goals, they often need to supplement it with additional external reporting capabilities for it end users. With the wealth of data entered and stored in ERP databases the ability to analyze and interpret the data is significant for management reporting. With Business Intelligence tool, it has greatly alleviated the backlog of report requests and has provided users with decision making information in a timely manner.
Business Intelligence is a method of storing and presenting key enterprise data so that anyone in your company can quickly and easily ask questions of accurate and timely data. Effective BI allows end users to use data to understand why your business got the particular results that it did, to decide on courses of action based on past data, and to accurately forecast future results.
BI data is displayed in a fashion that is appropriate to each type of user, i.e. analysts will be able to drill into detailed data, executives will see timely summaries, and middle managers will see data presented at the level of detail that they need to make good business decisions. Microsoft’s BI uses cubes, rather than tables, to store information and presents information via reports. The reports can be presented to end users in a variety of formats:Windows applications,Web Applications, and Microsoft BI client tools, such
as Excel or SQL Reporting Services.
Need for the BI application:
Check out following article where it is explain what is the important of BI application
Microsoft products involved in BI application development:
SQL Server 2005: This is the preferred staging and, possibly, source location for BI solutions. Data can actually be retrieved from a variety of data stores (Oracle, DB2, and so on), so a SQL Server installation is not strictly required to build a Microsoft BI solution. However, due to the integration of some key toolsets that are part of nearly all BI solutions—for example, SSIS or SQL Server Integration Services, which is usually used to perform the ETL of source data into the data warehouse—most BI solutions will include at least one SQL Server 2005 installation. Another key component in many BI solutions is SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). When working with SQL Server to perform OLAP administrative tasks, you will use the management interface, which is called SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).
SQL Server Analysis Service: This is the core server in Microsoft’s BI solution. SSAS provides storage for the data used in cubes for your data warehouse.
SQL Server 2005 Integration Service: This toolset is a key component in most BI solutions that is used to import, cleanse, and validate data prior to making the data available to the analysis Services for reporting purposes. It is typical to use data from many disparate sources (relational, flat file, XML, and so on) as source data to a data warehouse. For this reason, a sophisticated toolset, such as SSIS is used to facilitate the complex data loads that are often common to BI solutions. As stated earlier, this functionality is often called ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) in a BI solution.
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Service: This is an optional component for your BI solution.
Excel 2003 and 2007: This is another optional component for your BI solution. Many companies already own Office 2003, so use of Excel as a BI client is often attractive for its low cost and (relatively) low training curve.
Apart from Microsoft BI solution, there are number of other solution provider are there in market.
Following are the list of BI solution & tools provider
Cognos: http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/index.html
SAP: http://www.sap.com/solutions/netweaver/components/bi/index.epx
Business Object: http://www.uk.businessobjects.com/products/platform/enterprise.asp
Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/index.html
SharePoint Portal Service/Server
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a versatile technology that organizations and business units of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.
Built on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services also provides a foundation platform for building Web-based business applications that can flex and scale easily to meet the changing and growing needs of your business. Robust administrative controls for managing storage and Web infrastructure give IT departments a cost-effective way to implement and manage a high-performance collaboration environment. With a familiar, Web-based interface and close integration with everyday tools including the Microsoft Office system, Windows SharePoint Services is easy to use and can be deployed rapidly
Need of SharePoint?
• As companies grow so does the amount of their files. It soon becomes difficult to keep track of the multiplying documents and their locations. SharePoint overcomes this by allowing you to store and share your files in a central site.
• Sharing work files through email is a cumbersome process. SharePoint eliminates this by allowing files to be stored in one location, allowing easy access to all team members.
• Business Intelligence has traditionally remained in the hands of a few key decision makers within organizations. For years, it has been the goal of BI providers to “democratize business intelligence” by making it available to all levels of workers throughout companies. With the addition of PerformancePoint to the SharePoint Enterprise version of SharePoint, this vision is realized, finally taking business intelligence out of the hands of the few and into the hands of many.
• Today’s work occurs over multiple locations, whether it is in different countries, office locations, separate departments or at your home office. SharePoint enables teams and individuals to connect and collaborate together regardless of where they are located.
• Surveys have shown that employees can spend up to 20 – 30 % of their day searching for data and information. SharePoint eliminates this drag on productivity by providing the robust search functionality needed to find the information and expertise buried in the thousands, or hundreds of thousands of files a company generates in the course of business.
• It’s difficult and time consuming to create and maintain sites. SharePoint allows anyone to create sites for use within their company’s Intranet, as they are needed, whether they are departmental sites, document libraries, meetings sites, survey sites, or discussion boards.
Ref: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX100492001033.aspx
iPhone Application Development
iPhone is Revolutionary device which is designed and marketed by Apple Inc. iPhone provides downgraded version of OS framework to Mac OS X framework. iPhone has Cocoa Touch Framework.
Development tools involved in IPhone application development:
XCode: Complete development environment provides project management, a powerful source editor, and a graphical debugger
iPhone Simulator: Run, test, and debug your application locally on your Mac using a simulated iPhone
Instruments: Collect, display, and compare performance data graphically in real-time to optimize your application.
Interface Builder: Interface Builder makes designing a user interface as easy as drag and drop.
The more detail on the iPhone application development, check out the official “iPhone Developer Program” website.
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/
Development Related
ORM
Object-relational mapping is used to map object-oriented programming objects to relational databases managed by Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and other relational database managers (RDBMSs). This site provides facts about object-relational mapping products, architecture problem-solving, and direction in product comparison and selection.
Object-relational mapping products are designed to work well with object programming languages such as C#, C++, and Java. Database objects appear as programming language objects. Often, the interface for object-relational mapping products is the same as the interface for object-oriented databases.
ORM tools for .Net
ADO.NET Entity Framework is an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework for the .NET Framework. This framework is an ORM offering from Microsoft for the .NET Framework
ADO.NET Entity Framework is included with .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, released on 11 Aug 2008. It also includes the capability of executing LINQ against ADO.NET Entity Framework entities.
ORM for PHP
There are several tools available right now for implementing ORM technique in PHP.
Following are the list of few ORM tools which can be used with PHP.
Check out following articles which demonstrate you in detail ORM implementation in PHP.
http://www.developertutorials.com/blog/php/getting-started-with-orm-in-php-331/
Microsoft .Net 3.5
There are several .NET language enhancements to be introduced with Visual Studio 2008 including implicitly typed variables, extension methods, anonymous types, object initializers, collection initializers and automatic properties. These language enhancements, along with features like generics, are critical to the use of some of the new features, such as LINQ with the ADO.NET Entity Framework.
These are the such enhancements in .net framework which really can bust development as well as productivity of developers.
Following are the few of articles which demonstrate the practical usage of new .net framework 3.5 enhancement.
http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/.net-3.5-language-enhancements/
MVC framework
MVC is a framework methodology that divides an application’s implementation into three component roles: models, views, and controllers.
- “Models” in a MVC based application are the components of the application that are responsible for maintaining state. Often this state is persisted inside a database (for example: we might have a Product class that is used to represent order data from the Products table inside SQL).
- “Views” in a MVC based application are the components responsible for displaying the application’s user interface. Typically this UI is created off of the model data (for example: we might create an Product “Edit” view that surfaces textboxes, dropdowns and checkboxes based on the current state of a Product object).
- “Controllers” in a MVC based application are the components responsible for handling end user interaction, manipulating the model, and ultimately choosing a view to render to display UI. In a MVC application the view is only about displaying information – it is the controller that handles and responds to user input and interaction.
One of the benefits of using a MVC methodology is that it helps enforce a clean separation of concerns between the models, views and controllers within an application. Maintaining a clean separation of concerns makes the testing of applications much easier, since the contract between different application components are more clearly defined and articulated.
The MVC pattern can also help enable red/green test driven development (TDD) – where you implement automated unit tests, which define and verify the requirements of new code, first before you actually write the code itself.
MVC Framework for .NET
The ASP.NET MVC framework provides an alternative to the ASP.NET Web Forms pattern for creating MVC-based Web applications
Check out following articles for the overview of ASP.NET MVC framework
http://www.asp.net/learn/mvc/tutorial-01-cs.aspx
MVC Framework for PHP
php.MVC implements the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, and encourages application design based on the Model 2 paradigm. This design model allows the Web page or other contents (View) to be mostly separated from the internal application code (Controller/Model), making it easier for designers and programmers to focus on their respective areas of expertise.
Reference: http://www.phpmvc.net/
IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit
The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly. The IIS SEO Toolkit includes the Site Analysis module, the Robots Exclusion module, and the Sitemaps and Site Indexes module, which let you perform detailed analysis and offer recommendations and editing tools for managing your Robots and Sitemaps files.
The components of IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit include the following features:
- Site Analysis:
1.1. Fully featured site crawling engine – in order to perform detailed analysis of site’s structure and content, Site Analysis tool uses a built-in web crawler, called “iisbot”, to download and cache all the publicly available web site content. The web crawler is fully compliant with robots exclusion protocol.
1.2. Report summary dashboard – the results of site analysis are presented in an easy to use dashboard page that serves as a start page for various types of analysis. In addition this page includes a large set of pre-built queries for most common reports.
1.3. Query builder – Site Analysis tool includes a powerful and flexible query builder user interface that lets you create any custom queries that are run against the cached web site content.
1.4. Detailed URL information – you can obtain various detailed information about every URL in your web site, such as response headers and content, the pages that link to that URL as well as all the referenced URLs.
1.5. Detailed Violations descriptions – each content or SEO violation found on a web site has a detailed description as well as a recommended corrective action.
1.6. Word Analysis – any web page can be analyzed with regards to the most commonly used words and phrases within the content of that page. The results of that analysis can be used to select the keywords that most accurately describe the content of the page.
1.7. Route Analysis – unique routes to any page can be displayed in a separate report. This kind of information helps better understand how search engine and site visitors reach a particular page on your web site.
- Robots Exclusion
2.1. User interface for editing robots.txt file – the content of the robots exclusion file – robots.txt – can be edited by using IIS Manager GUI
2.2. Selecting URL paths from physical view of web site – the paths that are specified for “Allow” and “Disallow” directives in robots.txt file can be selected from the physical file system layout of your web site.
2.3. Selecting URL paths from virtual view of web site – the paths that are specified for “Allow” and “Disallow” directives in robots.txt file can be selected from the logical view of your web site obtained from the results of site analysis.
- Sitemaps and Sitemap Indexes
3.1. User interface for managing sitemap and sitemap indexes files – the content of the sitemap and indexes files can be edited by using IIS Manager GUI
3.2. Selecting URLs from physical view of web site – the URLs that are specified within a sitemap can be selected from the physical file system layout of your web site.
3.3. Selecting URLs from virtual view of web site – the URLs that are specified within a sitemap can be selected from the logical view of your web site obtained from the results of site analysis.
Rich Internet Application Tools
Adobe AIR
The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems.
Adobe AIR is divided into 3 different categories as per the expertise of particular developer.
AJAX: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/develop/ajax/
AIR with Flex : http://www.adobe.com/products/air/develop/flex/
AIR with flash: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/develop/flash/
Google Web toolkit
Google Web Toolkit 1.6 is a unique and remarkable platform-independent Java to JavaScript cross-compiler. The whole application may be written using most of the Java 1.5 features for which there is much tooling and test support. Not only that, but it is also possible to follow the Model View Controller (MVC) approach separating user interface from business logic, reducing cost of maintenance and increasing development flexibility. DOJO, on the other hand, requires you to develop the client using only the JavaScript language. This can be much more time consuming and more difficult to work with
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
jQuery
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.
Yahoo User Interface
The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Apart from these library/toolkits, there are several other toolkits which can also be utilized.
Mootools: http://mootools.net/
Dojo: www.dojotoolkit.org/
List of other toolkits: http://www.javascriptlibraries.com/
Tools for Web Development & Testing
Following are few exiting tools for the web development testing.
- XenoCode Browser SandboxBrowser testing is one of the most tedious and frustrating parts of web development. What designer or programmer hasn’t screamed bloody murder at broken alignments in Internet Explorer 6? One of the difficult parts of browser testing is that no developer can have every browser type on a single computer for proper testing.Enter XenoCode Browser Sandbox, a series of virtual applications that can run all popular browsers simultaneously. It does not even require the installation of software. However, XenoCode (Xenocode)’s Browser Sandbox can be heavy in some browsers and is still lacking in a Mac version.Use the following URL for further instruction on how to make use of such toolsRef: http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/
- W3C Validation ServicesW3C is THE standard in all of web validation. The W3C Validator looks into the markup of any website and display errors based on industry standards. It comes in over a dozen languages and a dozen varieties. Here are some of the most important validators:Following are the popular validation services provided by W3CW3C Markup Validation
W3C CSS Validation
W3C Link Checker
W3C mobileOK Checker - Javascript & CSS minifyHere is the site which allows you to minify javascript and perhaps the css alsohttp://www.vlead.in/resources/tools/minify-javascript/index.php
Following are the list of few articles which can also be referenced for different area of
Web development tools
There are many other tools available over the internet which can be utilized in daily web development.
Check out following link to improve your productivity
http://mashable.com/2008/11/01/web-development-tools/
Web 2.0 application & tools
NOTE :
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