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Creative Modeler screen
shots pricing
Every software company is
faced with the challenge of continually revising their application to satisfy
the changing needs of their client-base. Time spent altering and
configuring the application for particular customers often comes at the expense
of longer-term goals. To keep from being stymied by the onslaught of
customer requests, software providers often wisely choose to make their
applications as extensible as possible, and employ a configuration file that
allows them to localize the site of changes that must take place to roll out a
new client. As more and more logic is moved out to configuration files,
those configuration files become increasingly more complex and inter-related,
which makes them much more difficult to edit by hand. Without a robust
tool to help them, developers end up spending an increasing amount of time
configuring the application, which causes the amount of time saved to almost
plateau once the set of configuration files has reached a certain level of
complexity. Until now, businesses that didn't have huge budgets to
develop custom tools that were robust enough to handle major structural changes
were left to try to reconcile lagging development schedules with a backlog of
customer requests. With the release of version 1.0 of Creative
Modeler, Creative Metasoft has solved this problem by allowing users to
edit their own proprietary configuration files visually without having to go
through the costly and risky process of producing their own custom tool.
Not only can companies who purchase Creative Modeler2 greatly reduce
the amount of time their developers spend configuring their application, they
can even completely offload the configuration task to one or more business
analysts due to Creative Modeler's intuitive and powerful interface.
Companies who employ this tactic will enjoy the added benefit of reduced
communication time between the developer and business analyst, who is the one
that actually arbitrates the rules that are represented in the configuration
changes.
Creative Modeler allows developers to
leverage a highly extensible diagramming environment capable of editing any
type of complex, inter-related data.
Additionally, an extremely robust extensibility interface is available to
enable developers to transform structured binary or text files into XML, or
vise-versa, within their own applications.
The language of the source file can be described by the end user in an
XML-based grammar language that is an extension of the Context Free Grammar
concept, which is capable of describing any structured language.
Access to our Application Programming Interface (API) is available
through .NET, or a command line utility.
For each application that is customized using Creative
Modeler, several files will be created which are collectively called a
"profile." These files specify the structure of the data to be edited,
how the data will be represented visually, and any business rules that may be
necessary. After a profile is created by a developer, it is deployed
to business analysts who will be performing the customizations.
Creative Modeler comes in three editions: architect,
basic and developer. The architect edition is Creative Metasoft's
flagship product, and supports the creation of profiles, as described
above. The architect edition also facilitates the creation of UML and
entity/relationship diagrams, as well as round trip engineering with C# and
T/SQL, and support for Visual Studio.NET 20031 project and solution
files. The basic edition is for business analysts, and utilizes a
profile created by users of the architect edition. The developer edition
supports the creation of UML and entity/relationship diagrams, as described
above, but does not support the creation of profiles.
1. Visual Studio and Visual Studio.NET 2003 are registered
trademarks of Microsoft corporation.
2. Creative Modeler is © 2005 Patrick Gannon, and has a patent
pending.
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