Lucidoc v3.0 Uses AJaX Technology to Streamline Compliance Management; Web Application's Advanced Technology Underpinnings Offer Significant Advantages.

REDMOND, Wash. -- Lucidoc, a leading provider of advanced software technology for managing compliance, announced today that its newly available version 3.0 product is one of the premier examples of a mature Web application based on AJaX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML). The Lucidoc solution, which is designed to integrate the process of compliance with the management of documents and forms, enables organizations in highly regulated industries to automate reviews, revisions, sign offs, and changes in related documents, which helps to close the compliance readiness gap by providing staff with desktop access to complete and accurate documentation. Lucidoc uses an XML-based agile solution for managing documentation, supported by a JavaScript API (Application Program Interface) which provides client-side management of an abstract XML schema in most contemporary browsers.

Walter Knowles, Lucidoc chief technology officer stated, "The underpinnings of version 3.0 provide the best of both worlds: the speed and functionality of a rich client application with the easy maintenance and development agility of a browser-friendly Web application." The Lucidoc architecture transforms XML documents in JavaScript, which completely abstracts the client-side user interface logic from the underlying data representation, an architecture common in thick-client applications, but rare in Web applications. Knowles added, "This means end users can intuitively use the Lucidoc system without compromising their basic application assumptions from Windows or Macintosh and easily forget that they are running in a browser, because the personalization options provided by the rich database over XML transport creates the appearance of working on a customized application."

Kim Mackay, president and CEO of Lucidoc, explained that what clients appreciate most from this development paradigm is the network architecture transparency. Mackay stated, "Our customers see the Lucidoc desktop application as a simple set of web pages and this significantly minimizes the impact that our solution has on an organization's infrastructure and IT staff."

To maximize the XML benefit while still maintaining speed and browser independence, Lucidoc uses "lightweight regex-based XML parsing", an approach pioneered by Dr. Robert Cameron at Simon Fraser University. While most approaches to managing XML data via the Web rely on browser-specific API's on the client and heavyweight processing tools on the server, this negates the portability advantages of XML. The lightweight regex-based parsing approach uses a portable text processing engine that runs efficiently on both the server and client. Says Cameron, "XML has a reputation of imposing heavyweight processing demands, but smart approaches to XML parsing can really lighten the load." Cameron adds, "Lucidoc is one of the first applications to realize the benefits of the regex-based approach, pioneering a novel combination of JavaScript-based XML processing on the client and lightweight parsing on the server."

This technological architecture offers significant advantages to users including:

--Desktop application-like responsiveness. Most rich Web applications provide functionality through server-side session logic and the serving of many small Web pages. This requires significant bandwidth and server resources to handle customer demand which results in slower performance on the client and more server maintenance. Using AJaX in Lucidoc's hosted application provides a responsive, application-like user experience over the Web without placing undue demands on Lucidoc servers or the client-side browser.

--Reduced server and network load. With Lucidoc, the client application simply reads, updates, and transports XML data to and from the server. The JavaScript API provides an object-oriented interface for generating pages and updating content via XML on the client rather than the more common approach of generating pages on the server.

--Network transparency. This architecture reduces the time an IT department needs to spend on of application deployment and network management, because Lucidoc runs over standard network, using a browser with a security infrastructure that is already in place.

About Lucidoc

Lucidoc Corporation, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, was founded in 2000 and is privately held. The company's advanced Compliance Management Solution helps organizations in highly regulated industries create a compliance-ready culture and generate organization-wide efficiencies with their compliance infrastructure technology and tools. The advanced software was pioneered in partnership with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and creates the first "living" repository for thousands of documents and procedures. Delivered as a hosted service over the Internet or as a managed service via an organization's intranet, the software integrates the process of compliance with the management of documents and forms. This enables an organization to completely automate reviews; revisions; sign offs; plus changes in related documents, and provides desktop access to complete and accurate information. The Lucidoc solution is in use at leading healthcare, banking, and government organizations. For more information, please visit www.lucidoc.com.