Skyve Enterprise

Skyve Enterprise is the steadfast core of the Skyve Ecosystem. It provides all the functionality required to make an enterprise grade low code application. It is fully open source, and all applications built with Skyve Enterprise feature:

Security, performance, accessibility

Skyve Enterprise ships with tried and tested, battle-hardened enterprise grade security. The framework provides developers with best practice web application security out of the box.

Developers should not be able to accidentally compromise system security.

Low-code/metadata

At the heart of every Skyve system is a metadata driven domain model. Defining the domain of the application in metadata provides several benefits over typical code-based models:

• simplified modelling

  • metadata allows specifying attributes and relationships to be defined consistently and accurately

• less code

  • Skyve applications typically have orders of magnitude less code than comparable applications. This means there is less chance for developer error, applications are created more quickly, and maintenance is faster, simpler and less expensive.

• self-validating

  • not only is the code checked for compilation errors as per typical development projects, but metadata provides a key additional benefit of being able to be validated. If there are any errors in the model, the user interfaces and behaviours can be checked before any code is generated.

• easy refactoring

  • defining the code in metadata instead of code makes refactoring key model changes almost trivial when compared to a typical development project. This allows extremely rapid development as many decisions can be deferred or refactored easily later as the application evolves.

Users & Roles

Skyve Enterprise includes a user and role-based authentication management module. This is also expressed at a high level of abstraction in the application metadata, making it much simpler to maintain and extend when compared to other framework security models.

This means that a new project can be up and running in minutes, with no need to build login screens, password reset functions and other user management functions which typically must be developed for every new development project.

Back-office data management

The back-office user experience provides a powerhouse of functionality for end users who need to manage large quantities of data. Advanced filtering, tagging, saved views, row summaries and exports are just some of the features available.

Mobile

Not only are Skyve applications responsive to support multiple desktop resolutions, but Skyve will also detect if your users are running on a tablet or mobile and render a different template for each device. Developers can easily customise the desktop, tablet or mobile interface as required.

Spatial

Skyve Enterprise supports geometry as a first-class data type. This not only allows points to be placed on a map for your data, but also allows boundaries to be drawn and stored.

Jobs

The framework provides a mechanism to execute long running processes as a background job. These can be scheduled through the user interface by end users, or can be wired to be executed when a button is clicked.

Bulk communication

Built into the core of the framework are facilities for bulk email communication. It’s there, it works, no third-party services are required.

Import/Export (Bizport)

Another Skyve innovation is the “Bizport” function built into Skyve Enterprise. This allows fully related data to be easily exported from the system into Excel, modified, then re-imported. This is enormously powerful for business users who want control over their own data.

Javadoc, unit tests

Skyve Enterprise generates not only code documentation but also model documentation from the metadata. In addition, the application metadata also generates its own unit tests, providing developers not only confidence in the generated code but also a bootstrap testing framework to easily generate bespoke tests for application business logic.

Backup & Restore

Skyve Enterprise can connect to any modern RDBMS with a suitable JDBC driver. This makes it easy to add a new Skyve application to an existing database installation, but another benefit of Skyve Enterprise is its built-in backup and restore feature. A Skyve backup job backs up not only the contents of the database, but also any content uploaded to the system. Because this backup is independent of the underlying database being used, this means that it can be restored to any database Skyve supports as well.

This allows your developers to migrate from a MySQL UAT database to a licensed production SQL Server database in a few minutes. Or you can migrate your production Oracle database on Windows to PostgreSQL on Linux just as easily, no lengthy expensive data migration project required!

Simplified maintenance

Skyve’s low code approach – with less application code to maintain – combined with domain validation and a level of change scope identification as well as automated unit testing means:

• there’s a reduced risk when changes are made – less risk of breaking changes making it through to release

• there’s less code to maintain, meaning developers can usually find the source of a defect quicker

• Skyve projects have a consistent layout – maintaining multiple Skyve projects requires much less context switching as files are where you expect them to be

Roll your own

Skyve Enterprise is the vanilla framework, a blank canvas to create any application to suit your specific business process. Skyve Enterprise is free and open source and provides developers with the freedom and flexibility to build whatever they need. Organisations can then take advantage of pre-built Skyve ecosystem modules to extend their bespoke Skyve Enterprise system with advanced specialised capabilities.

Other Ecosystem Modules