It’s All in the RFgen Framework

The RFgen Framework enables companies to transform how their employees work by enabling real-time, on-demand access to mission critical data. Whether it’s a factory floor worker, engineer, service technician, salesperson, or executive, the RFgen Framework ensures that the information they need to be successful is always at their fingertips. The RFgen Framework is designed to be the proven foundation for any group that is interested in designing, deploying and supporting custom wireless and mobile solutions. All RFgen developers enjoy the following benefits:

With the RFgen Framework, even complex wireless and mobile applications can be created in days instead of weeks or months. RFgen significantly increases developer productivity by allowing them to focus on what they want to accomplish rather than on the mechanics of how to make it work.

Design Once – Deploy Anywhere

The RFgen Framework's Integrated Development Environment - “Programmers Assistant” - allows developers to design their application once and deploy it to a broad range of mobile devices, including PDA’s running Pocket PC, Windows CE, as well as laptops, tablets and fixed station computers. Using an intuitive, built-in design environment, developers can rapidly “paint” multiple screen layouts using simple point-and-click and drag-and-drop methods to create extremely functional applications with a compelling user interface.

RFgen is designed to maximize the productivity of your development staff to create new applications, as well as to simplify the management and maintenance of those transactions over their life-cycle. Utilizing industry standards, the RFgen development environment is so easy to use that many customers have been able to take complete ownership of their systems without the need for any formal training. Using our integrated development environment – Programmers Assistant – new mobile and wireless applications can be rapidly created and deployed, while maintenance of existing applications is greatly simplified.

RFgen uses an intuitive drag-and-drop approach to designing the data collection applications that will appear on your wireless and mobile devices. Once RFgen is configured to one or more data sources, it is easy to link an application’s input / output fields to that source. Doing so allows RFgen to do all of the reading and writing to the data source behind the scenes and does not require the programmer to write any code. In the case of our web service and enterprise connectors, the available business functions from the connected system are displayed, and the desired ones chosen for use. RFgen then has the ability to download the business functions schema and dynamically generate the code required to interact with the selected business process. With this intuitive code generation feature the programmer does not need to focus on the mechanics, only the desired results.

Some of the ‘built-in’ design features include automatic table validation, scrolling lists, default values for input fields, validation edits for fields, error message properties, automatic SQL statements, ActiveX routines and access to .NET libraries. Using these features, many of our customers have experienced productivity enhancements in excess of 90% savings in terms of development, testing, and post-installation support requirements.

VBA.NET and VBA Classic Scripting Support

In another significant boost to development productivity, RFgen includes a fully functional version of Visual Basic for Applications. Through the use of VBA.NET or VBA classic scripting, and the RFgen framework’s built-in features, even beginning programmers can easily create fairly complicated, mobile and wireless enabled data collection applications. To facilitate this development process, we have also enhanced the standard VBA environment to include a number of new VBA ‘language extensions’. These extensions relate specifically to the mobile and wireless application environments and are targeted to simplify such tasks as complex data validation or queries, transaction updates, label printing, data transfer / synchronization, and much more.

Why use VBA.NET or VBA classic scripting in RFgen projects? Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripts allow technical personnel to provide additional functionality to RFgen data collection forms by responding to events using Visual Basic programming statements (scripts). VBA Scripts allow the developer to enhance the capabilities offered by standard RFgen forms and other objects. In fact, developers may take total control over the client device by responding to field/system events, handling all data display functions, and even sending direct commands through the various RFgen data connections. It is this built-in support for VBA that lets developers "step outside of the box".

A Typical Development Scenario

In most scenarios, mobile and wireless data capture application development begins through a business analysis workshop (BAW) where your specific process flows, business rules and project objectives are clearly defined. RFgen’s Programmers Assistant greatly assists developers in this process by providing easy-to-access information regarding various enterprise business objects based upon the connectivity options selected. Further, using our built-in screen designer, developers can quickly develop functional prototypes of mobile device screens by simply “painting” the prompts in Programmers Assistant.

Once this is accomplished, users can then move to establish multiple presentation views of the user interface to support the various screen sizes, languages or role-based views of information that will be used during deployment. Regardless of the screen sizes and/or devices used, Programmers Assistant requires only a single set of business rules be maintained, with support for additional screen sizes or languages being quickly enabled without any duplication of business logic.

Next, additional functional and behavioral requirements are configured in the application to support operations like enterprise data search, data validation, input mode selection (keyboard, barcode scanner, speech / voice recognition) etc. Optional adjustments to program flow or other requirements that fall outside the RFgen configurable options are easily implemented through our integrated VBA NET and VBA classic scripting engine – a capability that allows you to entirely step outside of the box and generate the exact form of behavior that you desire.

Depending upon your update requirements, transaction templates are created that are linked to your enterprise business objects and encapsulate the business rules necessary for the successful interaction with your enterprise system(s). Your applications are then mapped to these transactions, or alternatively, directly to the business object themselves and updates to the enterprise can then performed in real-time via the client process or in near real-time through our transaction management sub-system.

Finally, there are a number of included methods to simplify the testing phases of your data collection project. The RFgen development environment includes a mobile device emulator for quick and easy workstation testing of new applications. The RFgen integrated testing capabilities are designed for comprehensive unit testing and debugging of your applications prior to their deployment. Running on the developer’s desktop computer, the RFgen Framework’s testing environment provides targeted platform simulation, full VBA debugging capabilities including object inspectors, watch and immediate windows, as well as communication, error and performance monitoring.

Open Source Transactions

The RFgen development framework is designed around the concept of an open, sharing of code. Since its inception, all RFgen based applications and transactions are by their very nature – “open.” There is no built-in prohibition on the re-use and sharing of application code, nor is any of the application code hidden from the developer. At RFgen, we firmly believe in empowering individuals and companies to take ownership of their mobile and wireless data collection activities; to show our support for this concept, RFgen has released a substantial number of certified, quality assurance tested, and fully documented transactions to the open source community. Just a few of the areas where RFgen pre-written, open source solutions have been released are…

With "Open Source" solutions, because the source code is publicly available, your company can quickly have the code tailored to meet your specific needs. Moreover, developers can re-use code written by others for similar tasks or purposes. This enables developers to concentrate on creating the features unique to their current task, instead of spending their effort on rethinking and re-writing code that has already been developed by others. Code re-use reduces development time and provides predictable results. Another benefit is that with access to the source code, the lifetime of open source systems and their upgrades can be extended indefinitely.

Having the ability to use open source building blocks to jump start mobile and wireless data collection efforts means that it has never been faster or easier to create applications that are tailored to meet your own unique business requirements. The RFgen "Open Source" approach to application development as well as its surrounding framework makes it a proven, comprehensive system that dramatically lowers the cost of implementing, customizing, and maintaining data collection solutions. With RFgen, you can take 100% ownership of the product with no hidden costs or recurring charges; our existing open source modules have been proven to save developers hundreds of hours by eliminating the re-invention of the detailed logic that supports the real-time needs of mobile and wireless users.