Understanding Development Tools

This section provides overview information and discusses:

PeopleSoft Application Designer.
PeopleCode.
PeopleSoft Application Engine.
Global Technology.
PeopleSoft Portal.
Mobile Agent.

Understanding Development Tools

The development tools that Enterprise PeopleTools provides offer a powerful application development environment in which you can build and customize PeopleSoft applications to suit your specific enterprise needs quickly and easily. By using Enterprise PeopleTools development tools you can complete a variety of tasks including:

Design and define application objects.
Enable applications to serve different locations and languages while sharing the same data.
Define end-to-end processes in a user-friendly, graphical design environment.

PeopleSoft Application Designer

PeopleSoft Application Designer is a metadata driven, definitional development environment ensuring you can develop new functionality quickly and easily upgrade to new versions.

Every PeopleSoft application contains a collection of related definitions, such as fields, records, and pages, that work together to provide the functions of PeopleSoft applications. Developing and adapting PeopleSoft applications is a step-by-step process in which you define and build the definitions, establish relationships among definitions, implement security, deploy your PeopleSoft application to the browser environment, and test every aspect thoroughly.

To perform the majority of these development activities, you use one interactive tool, PeopleSoft Application Designer. The PeopleSoft Application Designer is an integrated development environment that enables you to work with the numerous definitions of a business application in a single work area.

PeopleSoft Application Designer enables you to perform numerous development tasks including:

Create record and field definitions.
Build SQL tables and indexes.
Create and modify pages for the user interface.
Create and modify components (groups of pages).
Work with style sheets to customize the appearance of applications.
Upgrade previous applications to new PeopleSoft versions.

PeopleCode

PeopleCode is the PeopleSoft proprietary integrated programming language that touches virtually every aspect of PeopleSoft applications. For example, with PeopleCode you can:

Control presentation of information to the user.
Add and modify business logic.
Validate user inputs.
Perform calculations and data manipulation.
Maintain data integrity.
Update database tables.
Manage portal navigation.
Integrate with other PeopleSoft applications.
Integrate with third-party applications.
Manage workflow.
Administer security.

PeopleCode enables you to create programs using structured and object-oriented techniques. PeopleSoft delivers numerous functions, classes, methods, and APIs.

See Also

Getting Started with PeopleCode

PeopleSoft Application Engine

PeopleSoft Application Engine enables you to develop, test, and run Application Engine programs. You use PeopleSoft Application Engine to develop batch or online programs that perform high-volume, background processing against your data. In PeopleSoft Application Engine, a program is a set of SQL statements, PeopleCode, and program control actions that enable looping and conditional logic. You define PeopleSoft Application Engine programs in PeopleSoft Application Designer.

Global Technology

PeopleSoft is built on a robust global framework enabling you to deploy your applications across the globe. Enterprise PeopleTools is designed so that a single implementation can serve users in different regions. Users can share the same data while operating in different languages and applying different date, time, and numeric formatting conventions.

PeopleSoft's Global Technology provides the core global abilities that are common to all PeopleSoft application products enabling you to:

Operate in your own language.
Apply different numeric formatting.
Use any currency and market rate.
Support multiple languages in a single database.
Display formatted data using standards that users expect based on their language and country.
Deploy systems spanning multiple time zones.

See Also

Getting Started with Global Technology

PeopleSoft Portal

The Enterprise PeopleTools internet technology is a combination of the PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture and the PeopleTools portal technology, which is used for creating and managing portals.

PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture enables internet application deployment through a browser, and enables you to take advantage of PeopleSoft intranet solutions, internet solutions, and integration technologies. PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture runs seamlessly in portals created and managed by PeopleSoft portal technology.

The PeopleTools portal technology is built on top of PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture and provides you with the ability to easily access and administer multiple content providers, such as PeopleSoft applications like CRM and HCM, as well as non-PeopleSoft content. It enables you to combine content from these multiple sources and deliver the result to end users in a unified, simple-to-use interface.

PeopleSoft Mobile Agent

PeopleTools Mobile Agent extends the functionality of PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture to disconnected mobile devices, enabling users to work with PeopleSoft applications on laptop computers or personal digital assistants (PDAs) while they are disconnected from the internet or local network. PeopleTools Mobile Agent uses standard internet tools and protocols—web browsers, HTTP, and Extensible Markup Language (XML)—to access a mobile database containing application definitions and data. Changes that users make while disconnected are distributed across the network when they reconnect.