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Showing posts from July, 2024

The iPhora Journey - Part 11 - Integration to Cloud-based Services for Business Users Made Simple

The world of data processing is far different than it was 10 years ago.  More and more of it is being done externally by highly specialized service providers. This enables companies to utilize the best available services -- without having to reinvent the wheel -- and incorporate those services into their core business processes. The resulting approach is also more agile, enabling companies to respond quickly to ever-changing business needs. You can think of your business users as your subject matter experts. They are the ones who have first hand, daily experience with your data and processes. In a perfect world, they are the people who would be designing your processes, and in today's environment, that means taking full advantage of external services. Your IT administrators are the gatekeepers. They are charged with protecting your business from threats and maintaining the security of your data. The last thing they want to see are your business users exposing the company's data

The iPhora Journey - Part 10 - ActionStream - the Heart of iPhora

In the last post, we discussed the use of flow-based programming for creating user interfaces. In this post, we introduce the ActionStream, which is the the foundational flow-based component in iPhora. A workflow process consists of series of nodes that are connected together. iPhora AppBuilder supports many different types of nodes, including task nodes, notification nodes, and branching nodes, as well as a wide range of action nodes. A sequence of actions that are connected together is referred to as a flow. During our 20+ years of experience in automating processes, we encountered many situations where the same repetitive flow occurred within different processes.  Therefore, it would be beneficial if it were possible to reuse the same flow in multiple processes and applications. This led directly to the development of the ActionStream, which is a reusable sequence of action nodes, in other words a reusable flow. Originally, ActionStreams were just a way to quickly implement custom c