Customize the generation rules

The generation rules used by WebRatio for building the final Web application are fully customizable and extensible. Thus the development environment adapts itself to the needs, standards and habits of any work team.

More specifically, the development environment can be extended by:

• defining layout templates
• adding custom model components

Layout Templates

The visual identity of the Web application can be fine-tuned with full precision. This is possible thanks to specific generation rules that can be defined by a graphic designer and that will be used by WebRatio in order to generate the layout pages of the Web application.

The presentation rules are collected in a presentation style and can be written in any rendition language, most notably in HTML.

The presentation style and the application model are completely independent. Thus it is possible, from the same application model, to generate Web application with completely different visual identities. Moreover, it is possible to reuse the same presentation style in order to generate many different Web applications with the same visual identity.

Custom Model Components

The business logic of the application is defined by the components that build up the application model and by the way these components are linked together. A predefined set of components are available in the standard development environment, however the user can define and integrate new custom components at will. For example for implementing a complex task, communicating with a legacy system or invoking an existing library.

The business logic of a new component is defined in Java. Once defined, the new component is immediately available to the work team, and can be reused in any application model.