You have to look
at Caravan Business Server with an OPEN
mind. As some one very aptly put it as 'Clever
implementation of remarkably good ideas'.
Different than the normal web development
languages and has many features inherently
inbuilt into it. Caravan has evolved as
per the requirements of the users and will
continue to meet the expectations.
The underlying objective of caravan is
to provide a low cost, intuitive and platform
independent application development based
on open standards.
Comparing with proprietary systems from
any vendor is likely to highlight many
differences. Since its design is based
on integration of multiple services in
one package, some of the concepts used
elsewhere cannot be directly superimposed
on Caravan.
Caravan Language is compiled language
like Java, and it uses caravan database
as an object. It is provided with inbuilt
locking and is built for multi-user environments.
In Caravan the database is integrated
with application server, so we have to
evaluate the merit in including stored
procedures in the design.
Caravan, while not directly catering
to component architectures designed exclusively
for any platform, has enough interfacing
flexibility to reuse existing components
and programs in all platforms. This makes
caravan truly platform independent. One
case in point is using Caravan supporting
Web Services – SOAP to integrate
with applications.
Caravan though currently not object oriented
it is built on entirely object based architecture.
Caravan already has queues, and multithreaded
support for event handling. In fact, already
many existing applications of caravan
use the queuing in caravan for data management
and message transfer.
The design objective of caravan is to
create an expert system with the intricacies
hidden from the user as far as possible
and in this context we will keep the options
open on how far the system will confirm
to existing techniques and procedural
programming practices.
Some key and hidden features that are
different than most of the other development
tool. |
 |
No need
for any external component. Database, application
server, web server, communication all inbuilt
|
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Group (domain) and user creation. No need
to write any additional code |
|
Make a table
field full text search, while defining the
field parameters |
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XML object gives you the option of a Distributed
Object Model (DOM) facility to drill down
to various nodes from any parent node (using ‘.’) |
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No ‘JOINS’ needed to access
data between various tables. Caravan offers
automatic JOIN facility between ‘related’
tables. You can access any field of related tables
(using ‘.’) |
|
No stored procedures and triggers needed. |
| No Independent Development
Environment. You can use any text editor
to write Caravan Code. (e.g you can use
say on windows platform, a notepad editor
to Microsoft Visual Studio as the development
environment)
We have tried to compile a common set
of queries from the developer community.
We will keep adding our feedback on a
continuous basis: |
| Q. |
Are Stored Procedures
& Triggers available. |
| A. |
Caravan has inbuilt database and being
a 1 tier architecture, the application server
and the database reside on the same machine.
Hence no need to optimize and write stored
procedures. Direct access through the code
using ‘select’ statements. |
| Q. |
What are the hidden
benefits and features of the database, which
is different than most others: |
|
No stored procedures and triggers needed |
|
Automatic access to ALL the fields of
related tables (using “.”) |
|
Multi dimension database. Hence multiple
values can be stored in a single field of
a table. E.g Work phone, which can be |
| |
multiple numbers, can be stored in a single
multi-dimension field. (refer Caravan Samples
given with the help files) |
|
No connection pooling needed |
| Q. |
How do we integrate
with other applications? Does Caravan support
Web Services? |
| A. |
Caravan has inbuilt HTTP and XML object,
which is the basic requirement to make it
compatible to other applications, e.g using
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Using
the scripting language of Caravan, you can
easily build SOAP interface. Depending on
the application, Caravan can act both as
a Server or a Client |
| |
What's coming
soon:
The caravan database is being improved
so that transaction management, rollback
will be standard features.
Programming language of caravan will be
improved to include functions and user
defined objects, shortly.
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