The following Branch Transformation Toolkit components are shared across
the Web container and EJB container of the application server:
- Data elements
- A data element is a field that contains a value or a collection of other
data elements. Certain data elements are type-aware. The typed data elements
represent business objects such as Date, ProductNumber, and Money. Each typed
data element has an associated property descriptor, which provides information
about the data such as its type, its validator, and its set of converters.
- CHA
- The Common Hierarchical Area holds data within a context hierarchy for
the Business Process Component when it performs a business process. This is
a distributed component that allows the data to exist anywhere. It also enables
non-toolkit applications to store general global session data. The application
uses the CHA API to mover data into and out of the CHA.
- CHA Formatter Service
- The CHA Formatter Service handles formatting and unformatting of strings
and data items for applications and services. It converts a specific data
item into a string representation of the data item and parses a string into
a specific data item.
- Events
- An event is how components within the application presentation layer communicate
with each other. A notifier is the sender of an event. A handler, as the receiver
of that event, is responsible for consuming the event or propagating it to
other handlers. An Event Manager acts as the event controller between notifiers
and handlers to manage both local and remote events.
- Externalizers
- An externalizer is an object factory that uses definitions in an external
file to instantiate a specific toolkit entity. The toolkit provides externalizers
for contexts, data elements, formatters, services, and flow processors. The
definition files are ASCII files using XML syntax. This makes configuring
and customizing these defined objects (or implementing new ones) possible
with something as simple as a basic text editor although the Development Workbench
provides an easier and more controlled environment for this editing.
- Exceptions
- A toolkit exception enhances the standard Java(TM) exception mechanism to facilitate applications
accessing information about the exception.
- Trace Facility
- The Trace Facility provides a way to see what is happening with an application
while it is running. The information it logs can be used to solve problems
during development and during runtime.