Introduction
Welcome to Profound UI. Profound UI is a high-performance user interface platform for the IBM i. It enables customers to rapidly create connected applications that deliver the highest quality, rich user experience regardless of project complexity or organization size.
In the past, if an RPG programmer was to learn about Web application development, it may have taken years to become fully proficient. But with Profound UI, because of its native approach, there is virtually no learning curve. When working with Profound UI, RPG developers write programs using the same top-down approach they have always used.
Profound UI provides a very powerful visual design tool, which allows anyone (even if knowledge of JavaScript and HTML is non-existent) to create professional looking browser interfaces in a point and click manner. Using the visual designer, developers drag and drop components onto the user interface, size them, edit their content as well as appearance inline, and modify their properties visually in order to create Rich Display Files™.
Rich display files™ are saved to standard DDS source members and compiled using the standard Create Display File (CRTDSPF) command. They work with conventional RPGLE programs, and rely on traditional RPG operations, such as ExFmt (Execute Format), Read, and Write. This allows RPG developers to use procedural programming techniques they already understand. Profound UI’s session controller provides all the features developers are familiar with from traditional RPG programming, including statefullness, call stacks, level checks, informative error handling, subfile processing, overlays, message files, and more.
The DDS code of a Rich Display File™ contains metadata information to represent the graphical interface. Similar to traditional display files, Rich Display Files™ are organized into separate record formats that correspond to different screens, window dialogs, and/or subfile grids. Each record format can contain a number of GUI widgets, or controls. Rich display files™ have complete versatility in regards to the presentation layer of your application and can serve as a direct replacement for traditional green-screen display files. They do not use or rely on the old 5250 text-based protocol used in legacy RPG applications.
The platform comes with more than 125 types of rich cross-browser widgets prepackaged with the designer. These include all of the most common graphical components business application developers require, including editable grids, dialogs, charts, tab panels, menus, date pickers, spinners, dropdowns, list boxes, links, buttons, and more. In addition, the platform is extensible allowing web developers and ISV’s to create their own widgets or enhance existing ones using JavaScript API.
An important aspect of Profound UI is direct binding to program fields and database files. All widgets and their properties can be tied directly to fields in your backend programs. The concept is similar to display file fields and indicators in traditional green-screen application design. It allows RPG programs to easily populate the user interface with server data, as well as control the appearance of the interface through server-side code. In addition, widgets can be linked directly to DB2 database files on the i. For example, a customer dropdown can automatically be linked to the customer master file, or be configured as a database-driven auto complete field. The user interface platform takes care of loading the data, and there is no additional code that has to be added to your backend program.