Rapid Application Development Tools

To start your no-risk, free trial or schedule an online demonstration call Ahearn at 800-263-4258

Looking for an intuitive drag-and-drop approach to designing data collection applications that will appear on your wireless and mobile devices? Need a way to connect multiple data sources to one mobile data collection process? Are you struggling with how to quickly automate the data collection aspect of your mobile workforce? Worried about locking yourself into any single solution? Ask an Ahearn & Soper representative about our completely open Rapid Application Design software.

Benefits include:

• Open Architecture – step “out-of-the-box” using VBA.NET or VBA classic
• Open Connectivity – connect to multiple data sources and share users
• Open Hardware – deploy on the hardware that best suites your needs
• Open Systems – seamless integration with existing system(s)
• Drag and Drop Design – quickly and easily create your automated data collection forms
• Event Driven – respond only to events you want, let the software handle the rest
• Extensive R&D – benefit from major R&D technology efforts
• Language Independence – support all languages including DBCS based

The RFgen Framework enables companies to transform how their employees work by enabling real-time, on-demand access to mission critical data. Whether it’s a factory floor worker, engineer, service technician, salesperson, or executive, the RFgen Framework ensures that the information they need to be successful is always at their fingertips. The RFgen Framework is designed to be the proven foundation for any group that is interested in designing, deploying and supporting custom wireless and mobile solutions. All RFgen developers enjoy the following benefits:

Design Once – Deploy Anywhere

The RFgen Framework's Integrated Development Environment - “Programmers Assistant” - allows developers to design their application once and deploy it to a broad range of mobile devices, including PDA’s running Pocket PC, Windows CE, as well as laptops, tablets and fixed station computers. Using an intuitive, built-in design environment, developers can rapidly “paint” multiple screen layouts using simple point-and-click and drag-and-drop methods to create extremely functional applications with a compelling user interface.

RFgen is designed to maximize the productivity of your development staff to create new applications, as well as to simplify the management and maintenance of those transactions over their life-cycle. Utilizing industry standards, the RFgen development environment is so easy to use that many customers have been able to take complete ownership of their systems without the need for any formal training. Using our integrated development environment – Programmers Assistant – new mobile and wireless applications can be rapidly created and deployed, while maintenance of existing applications is greatly simplified.

RFgen uses an intuitive drag-and-drop approach to designing the data collection applications that will appear on your wireless and mobile devices. Once RFgen is configured to one or more data sources, it is easy to link an application’s input / output fields to that source. Doing so allows RFgen to do all of the reading and writing to the data source behind the scenes and does not require the programmer to write any code. In the case of our web service and enterprise connectors, the available business functions from the connected system are displayed, and the desired ones chosen for use. RFgen then has the ability to download the business functions schema and dynamically generate the code required to interact with the selected business process. With this intuitive code generation feature the programmer does not need to focus on the mechanics, only the desired results.

Some of the ‘built-in’ design features include automatic table validation, scrolling lists, default values for input fields, validation edits for fields, error message properties, automatic SQL statements, ActiveX routines and access to .NET libraries. Using these features, many of our customers have experienced productivity enhancements in excess of 90% savings in terms of development, testing, and post-installation support requirements.

VBA.NET and VBA Classic Scripting Support

In another significant boost to development productivity, RFgen includes a fully functional version of Visual Basic for Applications. Through the use of VBA.NET or VBA classic scripting, and the RFgen framework’s built-in features, even beginning programmers can easily create fairly complicated, mobile and wireless enabled data collection applications. To facilitate this development process, we have also enhanced the standard VBA environment to include a number of new VBA ‘language extensions’. These extensions relate specifically to the mobile and wireless application environments and are targeted to simplify such tasks as complex data validation or queries, transaction updates, label printing, data transfer / synchronization, and much more.

Why use VBA.NET or VBA classic scripting in RFgen projects? Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripts allow technical personnel to provide additional functionality to RFgen data collection forms by responding to events using Visual Basic programming statements (scripts). VBA Scripts allow the developer to enhance the capabilities offered by standard RFgen forms and other objects. In fact, developers may take total control over the client device by responding to field/system events, handling all data display functions, and even sending direct commands through the various RFgen data connections. It is this built-in support for VBA that lets developers "step outside of the box".

View a Typical Development Scenario