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About Penta Technologies, Inc.
Penta Technologies, Inc. develops, supports, and sells financial, accounting, and project management software systems for project-oriented construction firms. Its premier product, PENTA, is the latest in an evolutionary line of financial and project management software solutions. It is widely recognized as a leading software solution for the high-end construction market and is the only product on the market that offers the functionality, technology and dedication solely to the construction industry that is key to success.
PENTA was engineered and built using state-of-the-art software development tools and techniques -- like Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) and Extended Relational Analysis (ERA) -- to deliver fully on the benefits of its ORACLE SQL/RDBMS foundation. It offers four integrated application modules including project management, financial management, equipment cost control, and labor management.
Project Summary
At the outset of the project, the PENTA product functionality was distributed between 85% running as a legacy 4th GL and 15% running as a client-server Powerbuilder application. Clearview and its systems integation partner provided high level design work by working together with Penta in Wisconsin at their facility. The Clearview architecture team collectively possessed over 63 years of experience in designing and implementing large mission critical enterprise applications, and held numerous design and architecture meetings with Penta. The team authored a 30 page functional specification, and a 210 page technical specification outlining the approaches, a testing plan, and a project schedule.
Clearview managed a team of 7 technical specialists and application engineers to develop and implement the technical specifications for this 940 screen enterprise application. Since Co*Star supports a robust API, ActiveX Control and COM DLL support, a generation engine was developed that automatically translated all 940 screens from the client’s 4th GL into a series of client-server ActiveX controls and DLL’s running layered on Co*Star. The generated screens were then integrated into the client’s Powerbuilder framework by developing an automated daily build process that converted screens daily, produced client-server (Visual Basic) code, compiled the client-server code into ActiveX controls and DLL’s, and automatically checking the entire project into version control upon completion. This was a large undertaking, with extensive testing by a quality assurance team of 8 individuals comprising code reviewers, application specialists, release engineers, and regression testers. Without Clearview’s Co*Star product line, this approach would not have succeeded.
Middleware
integrationPenta was able to keep their existing 4th GL code base by employing Clearview’s Co*Star product. All of the Visual Basic development was done on-top of Co*Star – insuring that the 4th GL was not visible to users at run-time. (We refer to the Visual Basic layering done on top of Co*Star as the “presentation layer”.) Since Co*Star was used, additional presentation layers in the future may be swapped out as technology progresses. This means that JAVA, XML, Powerbuilder, Delhi, PDA, Wireless, or other presentation layers may be added in the future without disturbing the underlying PENTA 4th GL code base. Penta has the capability to service a wide spectrum of user environments from a single core code base that services all presentation layers. Co*Star currently provides support for an Auto-GUI presentation layer, client-server presentation layer, Citrix MetaFrame presentation layer, Windows Terminal Server presentation layer, or a browser based presentation layer.
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