by Mike Sfez, Creator & Chief Strategist
A natural paradigm for information processing
An important and innovative technology break through, based on a simple and as-old-as-the-world idea: the natural object.
The solution to industrialize the development of computer applications: drastically faster than the current market solutions.
Developing sophisticated and professional applications without using any programming language today is a reality!
How?
Work directly on the objects in their final manifestation form, thus achieving the "continuous integration" objective.
The axxun™ technology
axxun is a universal cyber engine for the creation, manifestation and publication of intelligent objects, through instantiations of their image models. It is a development and run-time environment for software applications.
Equipped with business process practical knowledge the developer imagines, analyzes and creates professional grade, sophisticated applications, with celerity and expertise, without the use of a programming language.
axxun doesn’t generate or produce any source code, nor does it compile or produce object code.
It has been tested and approved by the market place: hundreds of applications are operating in major through medium-size companies. To name a few: ERP in domains like: Finance, Accounting, Human Resources, Pharmacy Distribution, Medical Practice, High-school Administration, Marine Chartering, Insurance, Trading, etc.
Comparison
A typical SAP™ ERP represents thousands of programs and procedures, over 100 GB of hard drive space.
The equivalent axxun ERP equals to one unique dictionary containing the application’s objects, needing just 22 MB disk space, plus the unique axxun.exe engine of 3.5 MB, which also includes its basic objects runtime engine.
ICAR™ - The axxun methodology
Idea – Conception – Analysis – Result
Adapted to the software application life cycle, the ICAR methodology is of "Iterative" type. It covers the 3 (out of 4) last phases leading to the production of an application and its maintenance: Needs Analysis (idea), Conception, Development (analysis) and Execution (result of putting into operation).
The ICAR approach is called "iterative" because with each "Conception - Analysis", or backwards, iteration loop, the application is enriched by adopting all that was acquired in the previous loops. The minimal iterative cycle is instantly measured down to the level of the elementary information.
To conclude
Through the proven technique of instantiating a unique, single property, object class in the various plans where the intellectual activity unfolds, a new era is wide open for true industrial-scale software application development.
It is time to put the heroic and costly programming era in the ice age of history.
Nature – the source of all models
Burying an acorn will produce an oak tree following a natural process: the acorn’s rotting, followed by trigger of germination, leads after several seasonal cycles to the oak tree formation.
We note that by itself, the acorn produces nothing, neither does the Earth. It needs an event to be fired -"putting into the soil" - so that the oak-producing mechanism can be triggered, to be developed under natural conditions (light, moisture and minerals) to come to its full potential.
Where is the germination process program? Who or what triggers it? Where is the image-model of the oak tree (containing its properties)? The answer is obvious: it is encapsulated into the acorn!
The "planting" event brings-up the wake-up message of the trigger initiating the oak production process, which, in turn, wakes-up the intelligent processes of each property contained in the oak’s image (DNA). Each state of property is affected (interactively) by the properties of the others and by the surrounding environment.
The whole information processing is magnificently summarized in this natural model: intelligent elementary information (free and independent), the one and only authorized to evaluate and maintain its state, without any impact from external programs. "Remote" handling of its state is thus impossible!
Applying this natural approach to the industrial software development revolutionizes the state of the art, and dramatically breaks into pieces the production and the maintenance costs. This technology break-up completely eliminates the need for sequential algorithmic programming (procedural), because the information intelligence is not a program but, as for the acorn, it is a "non-algorithmic" statement of declaration of rules associated with methods, each method being composed of a verb followed, or not, by its object.
The information system
Information technology is the science and the technique of automatic processing of objects and services belonging to any information system where two categories of objects are subject to be modeled:
- Actors - Entities/objects of physical, legal, moral, geographical, or other type.
- Services - Used by these actors so that they can intelligently manifest themselves, as per their class, type and nature.
This population (Actors and Services) is composed of 10 object classes with pre-defined behavior, that the axxun technology calls the "Fundamentals" of any information system.
A Fundamental is defined by an enumerative list (simple, composed and/or re-entrant) of properties called Neuraxx™ (intelligent primitives).
The activity of a parameterized information system is essentially set to create transactions that transfer or assign an object flow from a third-party to another, or to automatically engender other transactions.
The analysis of organized transactional flows produces statistics. Any entity can be referenced by the ones that it documents.
- Actors: Transaction, Third-party, Object, Organization, Referential, Statistics and Parameter are the 7 types of ISE (Info System Entity), actors of the information system, commonly called "Entities".
The instances of each Entity are defined by a list of the Neuraxx™: elementary information with intelligent behavior during the different contexts of its awakening.
An event fired by an operator, an interrupt or a trigger, launches a producer process, pointing out the context of producing its results, as well as the mode of entry into stages of the instances of its actress ISE.
The production process can issue communication, messages or call functions (internal or external to the Information System), which are necessary in the evaluation of the state of certain Neuraxx.
- Services: Event, Producer, Context, Result, Interruption, Trigger, Message and Function, are the 8 active services of the Information System,
Any Actor or Service of the Information System manifests itself as soon as it receives an awakening message (excite) issued from a percept or from an affect. It is responsible for maintaining the state "true" of all its properties (Neuraxx) during the awakening period, that being ended-up by a sleeping message (inhibit) issued by the same one that awakened it.
On the origin of the fundamentals
The basics of the axxun technology are to be found in the observation and the understanding of any intellectual activity. They reveal the existence of four hierarchical and contiguous plans where any intellectual activity is deployed.
If we observe them from bottom up – see Figure 1 - we cover the synthetic way allowing to discover and to understand the origin and the essence of any conception and development activity for software applications (in the narrow case), and for intellectual activity (general case).
SYNTHESIS
(for Object Oriented Programming case)
Plan 4. ACTION - The real object
The results, published on different supports : screen windows, printed reports, files and database tables, etc. are the outcome of the operators’ and of the programs’ activity, that instantiate object classes of which models are described and defined, in the superior contiguous plan (in the source code), by the application architects and developers.
Plan 3. FORMATION - The forms intelligence
This plan is populated with a large diversity of object classes, "modules" instantiated by programs executed in the interior contiguous plan. Each class is defined by encapsulated properties (variables) and methods (functions).
Plan 2. CREATION - The creative thinking
The programming languages and the database schemas, associated to the use of building methodologies, are the tools used by the developers and the architects of software applications to "play" these object classes.
Plan 1. EMANATION - The ideas
The functional specification defines the expected results and services. It is in this plan that the final outcome is known (the Plan 4) and it is here that the voluntary impulse to make the application is issued.
An additional analytical effort, applied to the way back (top-down), would facilitate and justify the comprehension of the conceptual model of the axxun technology.
The analysis begins by getting the knowledge of the final outcome to be accomplished (the functional specs document). It is followed by the production of "atoms" which will provide the matter and services to be treated: the "Primitives".
The next step consists in building the model for each matter and service, through the composition of a list of properties: the "Fundamental". The fundamental instantiations produce the image-forms of the real objects produced by the application.
Finally, building the results is the outcome of instantiating "image-forms" executed by the axxun engine.
ANALYSIS
(as per the axxun point of view)
Plan 1. EMANATION - The ideas
Specifications
The Archae: it is not a real body and it doesn’t resemble any of its instantiations, for which it is the "archetypal model". It doesn’t have a name nor any property, but an infinite potential of attributes. In other words, it is the ATTRIBUTE of all attributes: composition, inheritance, intelligence, etc.
Plan 2. CREATION - The creative thinking
The world of Information System architects
The Archetype: the unique instantiation of the Archae (singleton of the unique ex-nihilo creation). The Primitives, instantiations of the Archetype, are single property: the validity domain.
Plan 3. FORMATION - The forms intelligence
The world of developers
The Fundamentals: pre-defined object classes. A Fundamental is defined by a list (simple, composed and/or re-entrant) of enumerative properties, which are "intelligent" primitives that we call "Neuraxx". The application’s image-forms of the objects are the result of the Fundamentals’ instantiations.
Plan 4. ACTION - The real object
The world of end users
The published results, on different supports: screen windows, printout reports, files and database tables, etc. are the result of the image-forms instantiations.
The instantiations performed on all the plans are exclusively done by using the axxun runtime engine.
On the axxun implementation
Coded in C language – reference "C Run-Time Libraries (CRT)" - axxun can be run on any win32-type operating system: desktop, server or mobile. The use of win32 functions is imposed for all interaction with the Windows Operating System of the hosting machine. It can also run on Linux distributions via an installation under Wine, to provide the add-on of win32 libraries.
axxun is open to external applications and frameworks through inter-process communication implementations like COM, WinSock, MSMQ and XML. These openings are available at the developer level through objects of "Function" type.
The current work is preparing the "web application server" version. axxun will be available to the users, with all functionalities, via a web browser, as a plug-in, since the memory footprint of the axxun engine is just of 4 MB.
The internal object representation of axxun is of character string type, in Unicode format. This allows performing quite unusual operations: develop an application on the desktop and copy its "dictionary" on the mobile for immediate execution, without any compiling. The character string representation of data is not a limitation; it just replaces the generic type "byte".
ICAR™ - The axxun methodology
Idea – Conception – Analysis – Result
Adapted to the software applications life cycle, the ICAR methodology is of "Iterative" type. It covers the 3 (out of 4) last phases leading to the production of an application and its maintenance: Needs analysis (idea), Conception, Development (analysis) and Execution (result of putting into operation).
The ICAR approach is called "iterative" because with each "Conception - Analysis", or backwards, iteration loop, the application is enriched by adopting all that was acquired in the previous loops. The minimal iterative cycle is instantly measured down to the level of the elementary information.
Using ICAR, the CONCEPTION phase of an information system takes place following 3 axis:
- Axis 1 - Identify and create the ACTORS (ISE), by characterizing their type and nature.
- Axis 2 - Identify and create the RESULTS that the Information System has to produce.
- Axis 3 - Identify and create the business processes, the production CONTEXTS for the results.
It is possible to begin by the RESULTS to provide (axis 2), then by the CONTEXTS where they will be produced (axis 3), and ending-up with the ISE (axis 1) component matter of the results. Also, we can invert the sequence as per the point of view of the developer. Therefore, the simultaneous and alternative approach of the 3 axis is possible, even recommended.
CONCEPTION - Creation of image-forms
The conception phase defines just the Name, the Type and the Nature of the reified fundamentals.
REIFICATION
Consists in the identification and the transformation in a "thing", in bringing a "thing" character, or to transform to reduce to the state of object, of what is intellectually.
- Reification and refining of the ISEs, as per the following sequence:
- The "Transaction" type ISEs: they induce the reification of their partners Third-party, Object, Organization, Referential and Statistics.
- The "Referential" type ISEThe refining concerns: the composition, the engendered transactions and the inheritance.
The ISE type automatically determines the relationship with its partners.
- Results reification (identification and creation)
- The ISEs of "Statistics" type
- The displayed windows
- The reports and status to produce
- The files and information to export
The creation of a result doesn’t concern the description of its content, but only the support on which it is published. It is the actress ISE that provides the published information matter.
- Contexts reification (business process)
- The creation of a Context defines its position in the business processes sequencing.
ANALYSIS
Instantiation of the image-forms
Defining each ISE (actress entity)
- Create the list of its Neuraxx and create those that don’t exist.
- Define the access path to its instances.
- Describe the intelligence of each Neuraxx in different Contexts.
The Intelligence is a declarative statement of Rules and Methods of the axxun syntax. There are 2 rules and 14 methods.
Defining the content of each result.
Define the list of published Neuraxx in the Result. Draw the Format of the Result if it is customized.
Creation and complete definition of additional Events and Producers.
The majority of Events, Producers and Results are automatically created by the axxun engine.
Creation of additional Interruptions and Triggers.
EXECUTION
Putting into service
The application is ready to be run. No need for detecting bugs: Zero programming equals Zero bugs!