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| BroadVision Releases Version 8.1 of Its E-Business Framework BroadVision has announced the release of BroadVision 8.1, an advanced e-business framework with modular web services, agile development toolsets and out-of-the-box applications. Key enhancements over version 8.0 released in the first quarter of 2006 include BroadVision Kukini, an e-business toolset, as well as updated support for newer J2EE technologies, a flexible e-commerce application focused on configurability as opposed to custom development, and integration of Kukini with BroadVision's Portal and Process products. Kukini is a new standards-based toolset that enables agile application development and facilitates more effective collaboration between business and IT professionals throughout the e-business evolution process. It transforms tedious tasks in website construction such as page layout, site navigation, data presentation, and report generation from difficult exercises in coding into straightforward assembly of preconfigured patterns. Incorporating XML standard formats and rich Web 2.0-based user experiences, and packaged as an extension module to the popular Eclipse interactive development environment, Kukini leverages Kona's core capabilities such as the BroadVision Process, Content and Personalization technologies. Customers operating e-commerce websites will find version 8.1 especially valuable, because it enables "configurable commerce" — the ability to configure their site using a robust e-commerce platform that is far more flexible than previous technologies. With 8.1, customers can leverage a platform that provides much of the out-of-the-box functionality needed by an e-commerce website, whether B2B or B2C. In addition, it facilitates the process of configuring pre-built functions to match an organization's business requirements. Configuring navigation, shopping cart, order fulfillment and other options is all quickly and easily accomplished via the Kukini workbench. BroadVision 8.1 incorporates the K2 (Kona * Kukini) methodology, a rapid implementation paradigm that dramatically speeds up the application development lifecycle, resulting in significant productivity improvements for customers. To help its customers harness these benefits, BroadVision has developed the K2 Methodology, or K2M, based on best practices accumulated from the company's 14-plus years of e-business project experience. The methodology emphasizes a "time-boxed" approach, iterated throughout all phases of a project's 4D (discovery, design, development, deployment) lifecycle. It also follows the 80-20 principle by replacing much of the effort expended on hard coding with simpler configuration and assembly of reusable Kona objects and Kukini patterns. Doing so delegates laborious coding, which represents 80 percent of the work, to "role players", thereby freeing scarcer high-end resources to focus on the inevitable, but more challenging, "one-off" programming tasks that represent 20 percent of the work. Field implementations of K2M have demonstrated substantial time-to-market gains and convincing cost savings across a wide spectrum of e-business initiatives. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Computing News :: home page |