The Brolin Component Library is the cornerstone to Brolin's rapid development of products and custom applications. It is the result of years of experience, containing feature rich, fully tested components that empower your application and enable quick delivery. The Brolin Component library includes components for web applications, client server applications and desktop applications. The following are brief descriptions of some of our major components and how we leverage them to rapidly develop your custom application. Development - Case Study
Dynamic Web Page Builder - provides a programmable framework and engine for binding data and code dynamically to XML page templates which are then converted to HTML for delivery to the user's browser. This component separates the user interface from your data and the business logic code. It also allows pages to display current data.
Document Library - provides a complete web based document repository and management system. Supports all file types including multimedia such as audio and video. Includes support for HTML documents. Includes categorization and keyword search features. The Document Library is a complete document management engine for storing and serving documents via the web.
STS (Secure Transaction Server) - processes encryption/decryption of secure web pages using SSL 128 bit encryption allowing a single certificate to be shared by multiple sites. Supports IIS virtual sites allowing secure transmission for sites sharing the same IP address.
Web Security Engine - provides role and resource based access authorization for web based applications. Includes user interface to manage users, roles, rights and resource access assignment. Fully integrates with the Brolin Web Security Engine. Allows resources to be designated as Public or Private and restrict access to Private resources.
Online Catalog & Shopping Cart Engine - provides a feature rich online shopping experience that includes an online product catalog, shopping cart, checkout process complete with payment entry, payment authorization, terms acceptance and emailed order confirmation. Fully integrates with Brolin's Transaction Management Engine.
Transaction Managment Engine - provides a fully web based back office transaction management system including order entry, backorder management, quotation management, refund management, recurring order management, invoicing, collection and receivables management, payment processing, fulfillment management, inventory management and journaling of GL entries. Fully integrates with Brolin's Online Catalog & Shopping Cart Engine. Also integrates with Brolin's Reporting Engine to produce a variety of reports.
Broadcasting Engine - provides an automated email broadcasting system for sending automated system notifications & email broadcasts to targeted recipients. Includes an email editor for creating text or HTML formatted emails including images and attachments. Integrates with other Brolin Engines including Brolin's eCRM Engine to automatically merge data into email broadcasts.
Survey Engine - provides the ability to easily create online surveys, questionnaires, applications and forms. Survey responses can use multiple choice, ranking, true/false and open-ended test response questions. The Survey Engine publishes the survey, tallies responses, and reports on the data collected.
Discussion Groups Engine - provides the ability to easily create online forums and discussions. The Discussion Groups Engine provides everything you need to create, manage and implement discussions within a website.
Membership Management Engine - provides a time saving and highly flexible engine for offering, promoting, signing-up and managing members online and is fully integrated with the Brolin Transaction Management Engine which provides order management, invoicing, collection, payment processing and GL journaling of transactions.
Events Management Engine - Provides the ability to furnish website visitors with an event calendar. Event brochures, registration forms, maps, etc can be imported from any Administrator’s computer into the Events Feature of the organization’s website. Event details, contact information, registration limits, seating inventory, pricing and payment options can all be added, updated, tracked and reported. Visitors can register and pay online using credit cards or other payment options. Attendance lists and badges can be printed locally on the Administrator’s remote computer, related email broadcasts can be scheduled and sent and, if desirable, a view current registrants link can be available to visitors.
Reporting Engine - Powerful web reporting ability is provided by Brolin's Reporting Engine. Allows standard industry report writers including Crystal Reports and Microsoft's Access to be used to create reports that are run directly from your Web application. Hides the complexity of the database, presenting data as a flat file to these report writers, making it easy for your staff to create new reports and modify existing ones. Fully integrates with Brolin's Web Based Query Engine to allow the same criteria used for screen retrieval to be used for reporting, simplifying the user interface and reducing training time. Provides a menu driven interface for registering new reports and report objects (views that create flat files for reports).
GDO - Database portability and independence are provided by Brolin's Generic Database Object, GDO. This component allows your custom application to work with a variety of standard database engines including Microsoft's Jet Engine (Access MDB), Microsoft's SQL Server and Oracle Servers. GDO instantly provides all the basic database functionality needed to create and manage database connections, multi-user access, queries, result sets, and updates, as well as integration with Brolin's other Generic Components.
A major benefit of GDO is that it provides you with the capability to redirect your application to another database engine at any time. It's as simple as making a parameter change. This allows you start out with a low cost, portable, small footprint solution such as an Access MDB and later migrate to SQL Server or Oracle which offer greater scalability and performance. GDO - Benefits Case Study
GQO - The flexibility of user defined queries for data entry screens and reports are provided by Brolin's Generic Query Object, GQO. This component instantly gives your application a consistent method and user interface for selecting and retrieving data. Most importantly, GQO hides the complexity of your relational database from your end user.
GQO - provides your users with two standard methods for selecting data, Quick Search and Power Search. The Quick Search option provides a simple easy to use parameter screen meeting the needs of the your most common searches. The Power Search option provides a more sophisticated screen enabling the definition of complex logic and Boolean searches.
Search criteria can be saved and reused, and it allows you to view and report on the same data results. This is a vital and important component that offers many plug and play features that simplify the development process.
GRO - Powerful reporting ability is provided by Brolin's Generic Reporting Object, GRO. GRO allows standard industry report writers including Crystal Reports and Microsoft's Access to be used to create reports that are run directly from your custom application. GRO hides the complexity of the database, presenting data as a flat file to these report writers, making it easy for your staff to create new reports and modify existing ones. GRO also fully integrates with GQO to allow the same criteria used for screen retrieval to be used for reporting, simplifying the user interface and reducing training time. GRO provides a menu driven interface for registering new reports and report objects (views that create flat files for reports). GRO also provides all the user interface options to select reports, apply queries, set report options, schedule reports, and to seamlessly integrate GRO into your application.
GEO - System stability and error recovery are provided by Brolin's Generic Error Object, GEO. GEO provides tremendous value by minimizing the impact of errors on your custom application and minimizing the support effort by automating the process of reporting errors. GEO provides your custom application with a standard method of trapping errors, logging them, notifying the user, and for non-fatal errors, allowing the user to continue without crashing the program. GEO includes a complete user interface that displays a pop-up window whenever an error occurs. The pop-up window alerts the user that an error has occurred along with a simple explanation of the error. It also provides options for the user to view complete details about the error, to enter notes, and to send an email to your corporate help desk (or Brolin's help desk) that contains the error details along with any notes the user has entered. Geo also automatically logs all errors, including the user's ID, screen form, sub form, and the date and time the error occurred, storing this information for your System Administrator.
GCM - Management of contact and company data is provided by Brolin's Generic Contact Manager, GCM. GCM provides a complete contact manager including user interface and integration to your other data. A key feature of GCM is Brolin's methodology for replicating contact data in both normalized form within the contact tables and de-normalized within your application's other source tables. This provides optimal flexibility and optimal performance. E.g. A property owner would be stored directly in a Property table and replicated in a Contact table with the Role Identifier = "Property Owner". This simplifies property data entry by allowing the user to enter the data where it naturally belongs. It simplifies property reporting by eliminating the need to create a join to the Contacts table. It also simplifies contact reporting by eliminating the need to join to the Property table when you need to see a list of all contact types. Joins create performance bottlenecks and are difficult for both programmers and users to understand. Brolin's pre-built functions eliminate this complexity and performance bottleneck.
GDM - Management of images and documents that are related to your application are provided by Brolin's Generic Document Manager, GDM. GDM provides the functionality to link any type of file to your data records. GDM fully integrates with GQO to retrieve documents and files based on user defined queries, e.g. show all documents for Class A Office space in the downtown Phoenix market. When a document or image is selected, GDM will automatically launch the files source program to allow viewing and editing of the file. GDM also provides direct viewing of images and pictures within your application.
Other Components - An intuitive consistent user interface is provided by Brolin's Screen shells. These shells provide standard data entry and navigation features and fully integrate with another Brolin generic object, GSM, Generic Setup Manager, which allows the user to define personal setup options. They also integrate with Brolin's Generic Menu Object, GMO, and Brolin's GQO. These screen shells save significant development time in the process of creating your custom data entry and data maintenance screens.