Veriquant Framework Overview

The Veriquant Framework is an end-to-end, n-tier development platform that provides a complete service infrastructure for internet-based data management applications, managing everything from the database to the user’s screen. On the host side the Framework displaces web servers such as Apache and IIS and, in addition, provides a rich platform for application servers. On the client side the Framework displaces web browsers of all kinds, providing instead a smart client service infrastructure. The Framework provides, in other words, whatever it takes for the many parts of an internet application to communicate, interact with databases, invoke methods, deploy updates and organize and display information.

At the peak of the Framework’s pyramid of services stands an array of services supporting what is obscurely known in the industry as EAV/CR. This is a system of storing, linking, querying, searching, navigating and presenting data in a way that so homogenizes every data point and association as to reduce by a hundred-fold the time that a developer would need to create applications otherwise requiring a nasty and huge database schema. It simplifies what would otherwise be horrendously complicated to design, build, test, debug and use. The Framework certainly supports any horrendous design, but with EAV/CR, a radical simplicity and power are available.

With EAV/CR and with all the lower-level services provided by the Framework, everything is defined, managed, and controlled by metadata. This includes communication, packaging and unpackaging data streams, interaction with databases and even presentation. Applications are configured more than written. Again this vastly simplifies program development, maintenance and deployment.

Because the Framework uses smart clients, much of the work typically allocated to web application servers is instead allocated to client computers, harnessing power typically wasted in conventional browser-based applications. Each client computer is a data processor in its own right. No time or resources are wasted sending presentation instructions (such as HTML) to the client, which it must then parse and render. No time or resources are wasted transmitting Java Script, which must then be seated and interpreted. Servers and bandwidth and air time are freed of the encumbrance of maintaining client computer program state. Demands on infrastructure resources are cut to a fraction of that required by conventional web application technology.

Data that is sent over the wire is dense, binary and unencumbered with metadata. This increases, in sheer communication efficiency alone, the responsiveness and speed of Framework applications by a factor of at least four.

Why did we do it? What did we gain by doing away with the established web servers like IIS and Apache and with browsers such as Internet Explorer and with all the text-based protocols by which those things talk to each other? We gained speed, efficiency, responsiveness, simplicity, development cost reduction, database convenience, the ability to manage hugely complicated and changing data structures and a many-fold reduction in the amount of server hardware and bandwidth required to drive internet applications.