Technology Summary
Adapt is based upon totally new software technology and provides an original interface to that technology and as a result, there is not an existing, established term that can be used to describe it.
The term adaptable application environment is used here to indicate that it provides an environment in which applications may be developed, shared, deployed and used. In addition, the facilities provided (that enable the interrogation and analysis of the application definition) facilitate the continual development of the application to better meet the user requirements as they evolve.
The concept of an adaptable application means that whenever necessary an application may be changed to accommodate new requirements or to improve ease of use.
The simple principle upon which the design of Adapt is based is that all computer applications require the same underlying capabilities, i.e.
· the ability to securely store data without restriction upon the type, quantity and structure of the information that may be held;
· the ability to display images of the data in a variety of ways on different devices;
· a mechanism for defining logical and arithmetic operations that are to be performed on the data in specific circumstances to modify values or to generate new data items.
If these capabilities are flexible and comprehensive enough, it is possible to cater for an extremely wide range of requirements.
Adapt technology is intended to make it unnecessary to use many existing types of software packages; such as spreadsheets, word processors, databases, custom applications etc. It will also remove the need to use development tools such as compilers, interpreters etc.
The radical step forward achieved by Adapt has been made possible by the development of a completely new software architecture that provides the ability to develop software applications totally interactively.