Rich Internet Applications (Magic xpa 3.x)
By keeping the ease of use and productivity of desktop applications and combining it with a lean architecture and wide availability, Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have become the most preferred alternative for both internal and external business applications.
Magic xpa Application Platform provides the tools to build core business applications that are suited to the mobile environment, providing device-independent enterprise mobility in a single unified interface.
Magic xpa applications can run natively on any smartphone running the Apple iOS, Google Android or Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile operating system by using a native client module to implement a single unified business logic. In addition to native deployment on mobile devices, Magic’s technology also supports deployment in hybrid or Web-based mobile architectures.
Magic xpa is specifically designed for enterprise applications, allowing enterprise mobile users to perform any business task in real-time. It also offers enterprise-grade security for mobile enterprise applications, supporting encryption of transmitted and cached data, user authentication and roles assignment, and work over secure layers to ensure no reduction in security as compared with desktop applications.
See also:
Developing Mobile Applications
The architecture that supports RIA consists of the following modules:
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Magic xpa Server – The core process that serves the remote clients.
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Web Server – A standard Web server used to handle remote HTTP-based requests.
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Magic Internet Requester – An extension of the Web server that is used to connect the client modules to the Magic xpa server and vice versa.
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In-Memory Data Grid Messaging middleware – The award winning XAP middleware from GigaSpaces is supported as a messaging layer, which uses a distributed, self-healing and scalable architecture.
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Magic Requests Broker – The middleware governing the flow of communication between the Magic Internet Requester and the Magic xpa Server. The broker is in charge of the load balancing by which each request is directed to the most suitable Magic xpa server process. The broker is also responsible to execute the fault tolerance policy and the capacity surge policy.
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Magic xpa RIA Client Module – A generic client module that servers as the front-end of the application.
Unlike other RIA technologies, which call for a collection of toolsets in order to implement the client side, server side, and client/server communication, the Magic xpa RIA development paradigm relieves the developer from the deployment separation of the entities and allows the developer to remain focused on the business functionality of the application.
Magic xpa automatically translates your business logic into practical deployment via automatic application partitioning.
Once a RIA is deployed, the Magic xpa platform automatically partitions the logic of the application according to the nature of each operation that the platform is about to execute. While running on the client, the client will automatically turn to the server whenever it encounters a server-side only operation. And while on the server side, the application will turn to the client whenever a client-side only operation is encountered or whenever the server-side activity is completed. The automatic partitioning is the fundamental feature of the platform, which enables the defining of logic without breaking the logic into client/server/communication modules.
To prevent applications from producing too many client/server roundtrips, the Studio offers a variety of tools that let the developer fine-tune and optimize the application performance. Though the task logic is unified and both client and server-side logic are written within the same editor, the Studio denotes each line as being either client side, server side, or neutral to any side according to the nature of the operation or the use of the defined entity.
Moreover, the syntax check facility of the Studio may recommend that the developer reconsider specific logic units for possible performance improvement bearing modifications.
A Magic xpa RIA developer is fully relieved from any explicit definition and maintenance of the user sessions and user contexts. The Magic xpa platform automatically identifies the context of each request and implicitly maintains the context to follow the current session of the end user.
The developer can define and utilize context specific information and further enhance the personalization of the execution with a set of functions.
Being a completely independent .NET application, the client-side module can directly access the local client machine to invoke local applications, interact with local devices, retrieve files, access the OS environment, and so forth.
This option adds an additional value to the result application by making it more adaptable to client-side needs and by enabling it to keep information persistent on the client machine.
A Magic xpa RIA implementation provides enhanced security measures.
Compared to traditional client applications where sensitive resources such as data can be directly accessed by the user using other applications, which may lead to malicious use of the data, the Magic xpa RIA keeps all sensitive resources away from any direct access by the end user.
Compared to browser-based RIA solutions, the Magic xpa RIA proprietary client module prevents end users from tapping into the internal communication between the client and the server.
Magic xpa provides:
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Administration – This aspect covers the issue of user groups, user management, and organizational declaration. Operating systems provide easy-to-use administrative capabilities. Magic xpa functionality lets you query the security information from the operating system, using Active Directory and LDAP standard protocols.
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Authentication – This refers to the verification of people and systems, that they are who they claim to be, and that they have rights to access the information. Magic xpa provides automatic user authentication using the Active Directory and LDAP standards. These standards let the developer specify an authentication server and perform authentication automatically during login. There is also an internal user-authentication mechanism using an internal user file irrespective of the operating system users.
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Authorization – This term refers to personalization, application-rights management, transaction-rights management, provisioning, and data-rights management. With Magic xpa you can enforce any authorization policy using business logic. There is dynamic authorization functionality and a wide range of privileges for every application object. Coupling between the operating system user groups and the internal authorization mechanism is also enabled.
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Encryption – This means that you can ensure that unauthorized parties cannot view data as the data moves across the network. Magic xpa uses internal cipher and decipher functions that allow you to encrypt and decrypt data buffers in your own keys or any of these standards: BLOWFISH, CAST, DES, RC2, RC4, RC5, DES3, RSA, and AES.
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HTTPS Support – In addition to the internal security mechanism of Magic xpa RIA and Magic xpa in general, it is also possible to deploy a Magic xpa RIA using a secured HTTP layer.
The front-end of a RIA is facilitated by a generic .NET client module. This generic module is used for all Magic xpa RIA applications.
The Magic xpa engine uses the Windows Forms .NET library as the GUI front-end for applications. This fundamental basis for the client side container provides full integration with the Microsoft .NET framework to let you tap into the .NET capabilities and significantly enhance application design, functionality, interoperability, and overall user experience regardless of the underlying server operating system.
Browser Free
One of the most significant advantages of the Magic xpa .NET-based client module is the independence of the client layer from any additional client-side layer, such as a browser.
N-Tier
With the open architecture model Magic xpa offers an application that can be designed and deployed in any given N-Tier model to achieve scalability, flexibility and tight security.
