IBM Releases New SF Components
IBM has released version 1.3 of its SanFrancisco application business components for Java, adding accounts receivable and payable frameworks to the application building suite.
Developers can use these Java-based frameworks as a foundation for building accounts receivable and accounts payable applications, speeding up the development process. The new framework supports features such as ledger types, ledger accounts, log items, ledger items, installments, collection documents, allocations, payments and revaluation. It also supports simultaneous tracking of transactions in multiple currencies, making it Euro friendly.
The new Accounts Receivable/Accounts Payable framework tightly integrates with the General Ledger framework shipped with the initial release of SanFrancisco last year. In addition to General Ledger, there are also SanFrancisco frameworks for Foundation, Common Business Objects, Graphical User Interface (GUI), Warehouse Management and Order Management. Minor enhancements have been made to all of these frameworks.
The SanFrancisco frameworks now comprise more than 800 reusable Java components and about 750,000 lines of Java code. “We want to give developers a significant head start in creating Java-based line-of-business applications,” says Bob Grawien, product manager for the SanFrancisco Project.
“It’s a quantum leap in how applications are created,” offers John Swainson, general manager for applications and integration middleware in IBM’s Software Group. “You’re not developing from scratch, you’re assembling from pieces. We’re giving developers the tools and components to simply build e-business applications, so they can focus on the business applications, not on the underlying technology.”
With this latest release of SanFrancisco, IBM is offering 18 months of free technical support to ISVs and 12 months of free technical support to new end-user customers.
Platform support has been extended in this release to include Sun Solaris, HP-UX and Siemens Reliant Unix, using the Oracle database to provide single-phase transaction support. SanFrancisco already supports OS/400, AIX and Windows NT. IBM plans to eventually migrate SanFrancisco to support Enterprise JavaBeans, as that specification takes shape, allowing SanFrancisco business objects, frameworks and applications to run on a wide range of server infrastructures in addition to the SanFrancisco Foundation infrastructure and the WebSphere family of application servers.
IBM says it will add native EJB interfaces to SanFrancisco as EJB matures to offer function equivalent to SanFrancisco, so that developers can migrate their SanFrancisco applications to an EJB base. The first interfaces should be available in the first half of next year.