1Ñ:Enterprise 7.7 & 8.0. The Software Platform
From a user's point of view, the platform is invisible – one cannot see how it works and what exactly operations it does to solve a particular task. All a user can see and deal with – is a business application that in its turn operates on the platform. This is like any other application works on the platform of an operating system, or like Java applications (or applets) what are created and later executed on Java platform. The platform itself is invisible, but it performs a great deal of things, providing all the business functionality necessary to solve business tasks that a solution is intended for.
From a developer’s point of view, applied solutions are developed on the platform and it provides a set of templates of business components, tools, means and functionality for a developer to use in the applied solution he’s creating or modifying. It is a developer, not user, for whom it is more important what functionality, tools and means are provided by the platform and we are going to look at these issues in this document from this point of view.
1C:Enterprise platform has a number of means and mechanisms defining a concept of quick creation of applied solutions – data structure creation, form designing, programming business logic, creation of interactive reports, etc. Presence of these mechanisms allows to correlate technologic capabilities with a business scheme of development and introduction of applied solutions. Certainly, on the one hand, they limit (and quite deliberately) a developer’s freedom in the way he creates a solution, on the other – protects him from designing and development mistakes and helps to get an operable solution within quite short period of time, that can be later developed and maintained by this or other developer, if necessary.
The key points of the platform to be emphasized here are that it provides rapid application development (RAD) through isolation of a developer from technologic details. For example, when a developer creates a business application using universal means (such as Delphi, or C++), he must take into account the database type it’s supposed to interact with, take care of what tables should be created, with what fields in them, of which types, how they should be linked with each other, which fields should be indexed, how often, etc., etc. In case of creation of a business application on 1C:Enterprise platform, he just needs to understand what business entity he wants (a document, such as invoice, or a catalogue, such as a list of customers, etc.) and add the entity into the applied solution. The platform automatically creates all relevant tables, types, references, dialog forms, etc. Algorithmic programming is used for business logic only.
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