Transform your development and delivery options with GLUE
Are your users wasting time switching between applications? Are your developers wasting time repeatedly writing the same code?
Delivering a suite of applications can be hard for everyone involved. Make it easier by allowing multiple development teams to create a broad palette of windows (not widgets) and then GLUE the in-house and 3rd party windows together so that they work to deliver an application that offers a coherent user experience (UX).
GLUE supports a dev-ops release process, allowing incremental delivery to groups of users and is particularly relevant for systems based on modern web apps.
Take advantage of GLUE UX integration to develop applications more quickly, respond to your users’ needs more flexibly and enable your developers to work more efficiently.
What is UX integration?
GLUE allows you to enhance productivity by offering several unique capabilities:
Create applications by combining windows from different dev teams
Front end, real-time UX integration enables a development process that can combine reusable components selected from a palette of windows from multiple dev groups into a single ‘Activity Window’. The component windows that make up the Activity window share state and activate as a single window.
GLUE’s code sharing is at the level of the window rather than shared source code. This allows different development teams to continue to use different frameworks and languages if required.
Include 3rd party screens in your window palette
The windows used in an Activity may also be selected from 3rd party applications such as Outlook, Excel, Salesforce and Thomson Reuters Eikon.
High performance real-time messaging
GLUE high performance real-time messaging allows applications to interwork within a single desktop or across multiple desktops. Messaging can be hosted using on-premises or cloud servers or on the desktop. Hybrid deployments are also possible.
Scripting
GLUE Windows are made scriptable by publishing developer-defined methods and standard control methods. These methods can be called from other Glue-enabled applications including 3rd party applications. Scripting can be run from VBA/COM, Python, .Net, Node.JS, browser hosted JS and Java.
Streaming
GLUE streaming allows applications to subscribe to real-time updates. These Streams can be published by desktop apps, web apps or servers. Streaming can be used to request prices from desktop feeds such as Reuters or Bloomberg, avoiding permissioning and performance problems associated with server price feeds. Streaming can also be used by a web app to subscribe to ‘relevant’ e-mails from Outlook.
GLUE Browser
GLUE apps runs in standard browsers and they can also run in the GLUE Browser, where web applications run as native windows with access to desktop UI features like taskbar icons, adjustable borders/title bars and screen-based window positioning.
GLUE Window Management functionality (Sticky Windows) is available in the GLUE Browser and allows a unified UI composed of windows from different applications that resize and activate as a single window.
GLUE Activities tie multiple windows together and allow them to share a common state to synchronise their operation.
Provide your users with immediate access to your application from wherever they are focused
Developers often only consider how the user spends time in ‘their application’. They then ignore the other systems a user is running and how their users move between applications.
Developers can provide users with direct access to other GLUE apps, passing the relevant context such as client account. This eliminates the inefficiency caused when users need to start/switch apps and then copy and paste data to other applications. For example, using GLUE a toolbar button in Outlook can provide the user with direct access to a client’s history in an internal application whilst reading or replying to a client e-mail.
Seamless migration, one screen at a time
Legacy applications written in any language can be Glue-enabled to allow users to directly use new screens from within their current systems at the click of a mouse. The new screen’s contents are fully synchronised with the current view, providing a seamless user experience and demonstrating GLUE’s capability to deliver new functions one screen at a time.
Linking old and new systems in this way provides quicker payback because you are able to choose which screens are delivered first. Early delivery also allows earlier feedback.
Once the new system becomes the user’s main focus, you have the choice to leave little used legacy screens in the old system, saving on conversion costs.
Mobile
GLUE-enabled web apps and Activities can run on tablets or phones, allowing windows to be shared between desktop and mobile.
Alerts and Notifications
GLUE notifications provide a pop-up based UI to show alerts raised by web apps, desktop applications or servers. A notification can be used to directly open a GLUE application, either automatically when the alert arrives or by the user double clicking a pop-up. GLUE’s flexibility lets you choose the route into your application that best suits your user.
Permissioning and entitlements
GLUE can integrate with existing Single Sign On systems to control which applications the user is permissioned to run, the version (URL) assigned to them and their application entitlements.
By holding the URLs in a central system new releases can be made without changes to any toolbars or applications that start the app.
Per-user overrides are available and changes are broadcast in real-time without requiring restarts. Pilot or training versions can thus be deployed to one or more production users with immediate rollback.
How does GLUE UX integration relate to Workflow integration products?
GLUE is primarily concerned with real-time User Experience (UX) integration that matches the speed of your users’ actions.
Products such as Zapier, Boomi and Mulesoft also connect applications together, but they provide a backend, workflow-style integration with lags (often measured in minutes) between a trigger from one system and an action in the other.
GLUE offers connections to these workflow products to dramatically increase the actions available to your GLUE applications.