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8 Specifically, the registry/repository system supports the following functions: • Central cataloguing of solutions, apps, and external services, and storage of their associated artefacts in platform-wide accessible location. • Versioning of managed entities and artefacts to reflect significant changes and to designate new states in development. • Controlling the evolution of managed entities and artefacts, by modelling lifecycle states and associating validation checks with state transitions. • Tracking dependencies among solutions, apps, and services and allowing for impact analysis. • Performing conformance checking to ensure that managed entities and artefacts are compliant to the platform provider’s ground rules regarding valid structures. • Monitoring of the external Web services on which apps are dependent to ensure appropriate levels of availability and performance, considering SLAs. 5.3 App/solution directory (store) An app/solution directory is an end-user facing Web application that allows customers to view the solutions and apps that are available on the CAST platform. Users can select a solution, view all apps that are compatible with the particular solution, enable/disable optional apps, and install them to their account, triggering all necessary licensing/billing/configuration steps through standardized wizards. Input for these wizards can be extracted from app metadata (app/solution manifest) that were written to the registry/repository during app deployment. Installation of an app in the CAST context does not mean that native code and artefacts are deployed / installed to a special location. Installation means unlocking the functionality of an app for a specific user. During installation of an app, the database schema specifications will be applied (e.g. new tables will be created or existing tables will be extended). Furthermore, other artefacts of the app will be interpreted from this point on. This also holds for native code: dispatchers in the CAST platform core will call the associated native code components after an app has been unlocked for the user. This also means that native code parts of an app are always part of the CAST platform's code base, but they will not be invoked until an app is explicitly installed. 6 CAST platform packaging model Apps are the basic blocks for creating enterprise software solutions and customisations within the CAST platform. There can be apps that are pre-fabricated by the CAST platform provider (e.g. built-in apps for basic functionalities like contact management or document management) and are subsequently configured by a platform partner for a particular solution or customisation, or apps which are developed by a platform partner from the ground-up, and subsequently added to the platform for other partners to reuse and customise for their own solutions.
9 Every solution or customisation is a package which consists of a set of apps, as well as a number of artefacts that determine how these apps are to be combined and executed by the platform’s runtime infrastructure. Those artefacts are primarily used for defining solution-specific constraints on the apps involved. Since an app can be part of more than one solution, different constraints can be active for a particular app depending on the execution context. An example for such a constraint is a domainspecific or tenant-specific reduction of the valid range of a value (which may be unbounded in the general data model for an app). Fig. 1. Example of packaging a CRM solution for insurance companies Figure 1 shows an example of a CRM solution addressed to insurance companies. The solution reuses four pre-fabricated apps (Address management, Document management, Email management and Calendar management) which have been developed by the provider of the CAST platform. Additionally, the solution developer creates four solution-specific apps: two data-centric apps for the new Insurance policy and Seminar data object types, and two process-centric apps for Insurance Policy Renegotiation and Importing of Insurance Policy Data (for performing mass imports from third party systems). In addition, two app extensions are employed to extend the functionality of the Address management, Document management and Email management apps. The Organisation structuring app extension automatically links address objects that belong together (e.g. for a subsidiary company) within the Address management app. The Coverflow app extension extends the user interface of the Document management and Email management apps by allowing the user to visually flip through snapshots of the contents of the corresponding data objects using three-dimensional animation.
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