1996
Foundation1 was now a complete application development platform.
Rational Rose had been introduced as the design tool,
and IFS/Design helped transform the Booch object models to implementation code.
The Build and Deploy tools used to create software distributions, install and upgrade, were now fully functional.
Migration of the SYSTEM4 on to the new architecture was in full progress.
IFS Maintenance was the solution that had come the furthest.
This year Sun's Java started to spread its wings. IFS prototyped a graphical Java client using the same business logic as the Windows client - for the first time benefiting from the layered architecture.
Although functional, the prototype demonstrated that big graphical Java programs just didn't run fast enough on the hardware of the time. Instead IFS decided to go with real web clients (just using HTML). The first attempts were made using Oracle web server (OWS).
However, Java lent itself nicely to server development and IFS developed its first Java based product - IFS Event Server. The Event Server allowed business logic to proactively send events and notifications (such as e-mails and SMS messages) to clients and other interested parties.
1997
During the summer,
IFS released its first complete ERP application built entirely on the new Foundation1 platform - IFS Applications 98. This was a major milestone and a number of customer installations were done during 1997 and 1998.
The Foundation1 team was, like many software vendors, busy with the migration of the windows clients and frameworks from Win16 to Win32 platform. This migration was completed in October with the release of Foundation1 2.0. For this version, the Rational Rose tool had also been upgraded and UML was now the notation used for design.
With Java applets struggling to do anything but simple games and animations, server side scripting emerged as a faster and easier way of building "cgi type" applications that only relied on standard HTML in the browser. IFS found the combination of Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) and FrontPage to be a very productive environment for server pages. To make development of server pages easier, a framework of server-side components for business logic access, page formatting etc. was to be developed. Trying to avoid technology lock-in, the decision was made to implement these components in Java rather than a Microsoft-specific technology such as Visual Basic. Doing this, IFS was among the first companies to make use of the Microsoft Java SDK with its Java <-> COM interoperability capabilities. The Microsoft Transaction Service (MTS) was used to provide scalability.
The results of these efforts were packaged as an "add-on to Foundation1 for development of web user interface using Microsoft ASP and MTS". This package was dubbed the Web Kit - a name that should live for many years to come. Some prototype web solutions were developed for IFS Applications 98.
