Software Technology Overview:  FORTE

 Basics about FORTE 


		WHY IS FORTE ? 

Four points supporting FORTE as a good choice for developers

1. Provides SCALABILITY due to its three-tiered architecture


2. Provides REUSABILITY  and  DATA SHARING


3. Preserves DATA INTEGRITY

 
4. Provides IMMEDIATE NOTIFICATION


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		Basics about FORTE

FORTE is a leader in three tiered architecture tools competition.

FORTE saves development time for multi-platform environment and 
      delivers reusable solutions for data intensive business applications.

FORTE is using an object-oriented programming language of 4-th generation.

FORTE invokes objects and services in a distributed environment.

FORTE is an event driven system allowing to post events on the objects.

FORTE classes library provides special data structures and important functionality:

- Standard flow control structures like FOR, IF, WHILE and CASE.
- Event handling with POST EVENTstatement in response to specified events.
- Multitasking that allows to start a new task with the START TASK statement.
- Transactions specified by BEGIN TRANSACTION/END TRANSACTION block .
- Oracle and Sybase access with SQL.
- Exception handling with the RAISE statement.

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 1. Provides SCALABILITY due to its three-tiered architecture 



    This triangle gives another example of partitioning applications
     on the way of Client-Server computing. 
     Each partition is a logical part of an application 
     that can be independently distributed.

     The three-tiered architecture divides applications 
      into parts that run on different type of computers: 
      clients, application servers and data servers.

     The client partition contains the user interface, 
     display, processing and startup code. 
     This allows to run the application from the machine.

     A data server partition contains one or more servers 
     specifically dealing with database access.

     An application server partition is responsible for all other services.
     One ore more servers can be dedicated to the application partition.

FORTE is the only tool allowing dynamically start or stop additional
server processes depending on the number of users on line.

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 2. Provides REUSABILITY  and  DATA SHARING
	that leads to less code and more reliable system and
	especially beneficial for multi-applicational environment.

FORTE is the only CASE tool using Object-Oriented 4 GL 
with all the benefits of Object-Oriented development.
	
	Why use objects ?
	Using objects provides two important advantages.
	First, once defined a particular class can be used any number
	of times within an application or stored in a library for use
	within other applications.
	Second, the modular design provides a natural basis for
	partitioning the application across a set of machines.
	In FORTE, individual objects can have different physical
	locations. FORTE automatically performs operations on the
	machine where the object resides.

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 3. Preserves DATA INTEGRITY 
    by providing TRANSACTIONAL approach in database activity

	Example:

	begin transaction
		sgl  UPDATE .....
		sql  INSERT .....
		sql  DELETE ....
		...............................
	end transaction;

If any of action inside of TRANSACTION fails all the data will be 
restored back by FORTE (roll back) to preserve DATA INTEGRITY.

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 4. Provides IMMEDIATE NOTIFICATION

     	FORTE is an Event-Based System.
	Each object can cause another objects to "react" by triggering
	an event. End user action, such as data entry, button clicks,
	menu selection, trigger events to which the objects can respond.
	Any method that is operating on an object can also trigger an event.

	In FORTE an event is simply a notification that something 
	interesting happened. 
	Triggering an event is like "BROADCASTING" a signal to the
	rest of the system that a certain condition or action occurred.
	Any number of objects may be "tuned in," waiting for that
	particular signal. 
	When they receive the event, they will respond to it.
	If no objects "tuned in," there will be no response.

	Using events is a one-way form of interaction.
	One object produces event and another responds to it.
	No communication takes place after the event is triggered.

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