Concepts Overview

Dynamic Applications

There are several must-know concepts that are implied in the cloud toolkit and have to be understood before getting started. Some of them are closely related to the dynamic applications nature and behavior, others just follow the best practices from the service architecture reflected also in the cloud applications.

Repository

First comes the concept of a repository. It is the place where the application's content is stored - such as a database for the Eclipse Dirigible's instance.

Workspace

Next is the concept of a workspace that is very similar to the well known workspace from desktop IDEs (e.g., Eclipse). The workspace can hold one or more projects. One user can have multiple workspaces, but can work in only one at a given moment of time.

Registry

Registry and the related publishing processes are taken from the SOA (UDDI) and recent API management trends to bring some of their strengths, such as discoverability, reusability, loose coupling, relevance, etc.

Generation

To boost the development productivity at the very initial phase, we introduced template-based generation of application artifacts via wizards.

Entity Services

The new Web 2.0 paradigm and the leveraged REST architectural style changed the way services should behave and be described. Although there is push for bilateral contracts only and free description of the services, we decided to introduce a more sophisticated kind of services for special purposes - entity services.

Modeling

This is the visual definition of database schema models, entity data models, and BPMN processes. In Eclipse Dirigible, modeling is enabled by several editors and modelers.

REST framework

Along with the low level HTTP request, response, and session handling, Eclipse Dirigible provides a higher level framework for building REST services. More information on how to use this framework can be found here.

Web Content

This is the client-side application code transported via the container web channel. More information can be found here.

Mobile Apps

Mobile application support in Eclipse Dirigible is achieved via Tabris.js.

Extensions

Extensibility is an important requirement for business applications built to follow custom processes in Line of Business (LoB) areas. In the cloud toolkit, a generic description of the extension points and extensions is provided without explicitly defining the contract. This a simple but powerful way to define extensions.