Learn more about ThinkCAP at www.clearnova.com/thinkcap

Application Development:
The Need to Do Better
Developing robust business applications is expensive. The costs are represented in various ways:

• labor-intensive development that relies on highly skilled programmers
• length of time to deployment
• difficulty in maintenance and upgrades
• scarcity of skilled programmers
• inability to meet the needs of the business in a timely manner

There is a better approach to application development. ClearNova's ThinkCAP offers a faster, easier way to produce business applications that meet schedule, cost, and skill constraints. ThinkCAP is focused on one thing: to simplify and accelerate the development and maintenance of web-based business applications. It produces applications that are robust, reliable, and roll out in less than half the time.

Lowering the Bar to J2EE Use
J2EE is powerful and versatile but also complex. And although it can deliver reliability, scalability, and security, sometimes those benefits are achieved slowly and at high cost. For all its capabilities, J2EE has suffered from a lack of highly productive environments. Tools exist for writing low-level code and objects--but they aren't designed for business applications where presentation and data flow are critical--and often dynamic.

ThinkCAP extends the power of J2EE by making it widely accessible. ThinkCAP visual workbench provides easy-to-use, extensible data-aware components that can be used and configured easily and tied to data, objects, or XML. ThinkCAP helps with developing pages, page flows, forms, data views, queries, charts and graphs, and much more. Instead of writing plumbing code, ThinkCAP lets developers concentrate on functionality. With ThinkCAP, you don't need to be a J2EE expert to create a business application.

TieredRAD^TM: Productivity Tools for the Entire Development Team
Traditional J2EE application development relies almost exclusively on programmers working in a code-centric environment. These traditional environments exclude the experts with a lower level of J2EE knowledge but a higher level of business awareness and visual development experience.

ThinkCAP's TieredRAD approach, however, is one of empowerment, not exclusion--of increasing productivity and shortening development time by matching tools to people, and people to tasks. TieredRAD provides the appropriate tools and levels of RAD support for everyone contributing to application development.

ThinkCAP supports J2EE programmers with object-relational mapping, service assembly of web services & EJBs, server object creation, and a bundled copy of Eclipse (any tool is supported however). Business developers use advanced visual designers, Smart Data Binding, and event-driven coding. Content owners have integrated content management features.

Since team members use tools that are designed for their specific skills, they can work faster, with fewer errors. And because they work concurrently, the applications are built faster and more reliably.

Productivity and Reusable Components
ThinkCAP includes a powerful set of integrated frameworks for constructing web applications and portals. It delivers a wide array of ready-to-use business and portal components, data-aware visual controls, connectors for data access, and management utilities. Assembling applications from components is simpler and over twice as fast as writing code. Using pre-built, pre-tested components also reduces overall project risk. Pluggable, reusable ThinkCAP components are available at every level of application development. Developers can easily add their own components and make them available to the entire project team.

The Proof Is in the Application
Using ThinkCAP, ClearNova recreated the functionality of the Java Pet Store application in 447 lines of code--barely 25 percent of Microsoft .NET's best effort--and dramatically lower than other J2EE environments.

It's easy to claim that ThinkCAP is fast, productive, and scalable to the enterprise, but real world applications built with ThinkCAP and in use today prove it.

Carlson Wagonlit Government Travel needed a J2EE thin-client application to replace its existing Oracle Forms application. Estimates for code-centric development exceeded one year and a team of almost 20 developers. With ThinkCAP, Carlson went from design to completion in under three months using a team of eight people. Carlson was then awarded a ten-year contract to provide travel services to 23 government agencies.

ThinkCAP: Focused on Business Applications
The benefits of ThinkCAP are many, but the key point is ThinkCAP's single point of focus: to simplify and accelerate the development and maintenance of web-based applications. ThinkCAP is field-proven--it reduces project risk, leverages organizational skills, lowers the cost of development and maintenance, and dramatically shortens project timelines.