Trilog Group's FlowBuilder 3.0 Receives Highest Rating from DominoPower Magazine.

WOBURN, Mass. -- FlowBuilder called "Domino's bridge into J2EE;" Review Highlights Value of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to Lotus Notes ISVs

Trilog Group, Inc., a pioneer in rapid development frameworks that open the door to J2EE for Lotus Notes solutions and developers, today announced that FlowBuilder 3.0, its flagship product, received a "5 out of 5" rating in a thorough technical review published in the July issue of DominoPower Magazine ("FlowBuilder 3.0: Domino's bridge into J2EE"). In the words of reviewer Jack Dausman, a partner at ICI Systems, Inc., "If you are looking to build workflow applications that offer a web interface and the scalability of J2EE, then FlowBuilder is a home run." ICI Systems is an award-winning IBM/Lotus and Microsoft training center and consultancy in the Washington, D.C. area.

FlowBuilder is an integrated J2EE development framework, based on a powerful Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that reproduces the Domino developer experience for open-standards platforms. With FlowBuilder, Domino developers can build the same class of collaborative, core business process solutions using their existing skills, without first having to learn Java and without any loss in productivity. This enables Domino shops to leverage their existing developer resources as they implement a J2EE or portal strategy, saving the time and expense of staff retraining (or replacement), and avoiding the decline in development productivity that often accompanies Java projects.

"There were times when working with FlowBuilder felt like working with a combination of Lotus Workflow and Domino, as if they had been fused together and redesigned for J2EE," wrote Dausman. "I say this not because FlowBuilder is a repackaged Lotus Domino, but because the RAD power of Domino is very much alive and well in FlowBuilder 3.0." This view is seconded by John Tripp, Systems Development Director with J. Walter Thompson in Detroit, who goes one step further, noting that "If Lotus Notes were built today, it would look a lot like FlowBuilder 3.0."

From a development point of view, FlowBuilder provides a superset of Domino's capabilities. Trilog has capitalized on this characteristic to provide the highly automated migration of Notes applications to J2EE platforms. FlowBuilder's Migration Wizard analyzes the design elements of an existing Domino application and automatically migrates forms, views, formulas, rich text, and other design components to the new target platform, and moves all of the application's data, documents, and attachments to a relational database, where it is stored as XML. While FlowBuilder does not automatically translate LotusScript into Java, the high-level environment includes many powerful tools that obviate the need for LotusScript in the first place. For example, relational database support and the ability to represent one-to-many data relationships in a single XML document eliminate the contortions that one must otherwise go through to create dynamic tables from Domino's flat data model. Similarly, FlowBuilder's graphical workflow modeling tool automatically generates the code to implement workflows and route documents, again without scripting. FlowBuilder's component framework also includes many pre-built visual "beans" to simplify other common tasks. The result is faster development with fewer errors, rapid migration, and simplified enhancement.

Importantly, FlowBuilder "seamlessly connects into any IT infrastructure." FlowBuilder generates pure Java code that is packaged as a standard .WAR file to run on any standard Web application server, JSR-168 compliant portal server, relational database, and LDAP directory. As a result, customers have an uncommon degree of choice in selecting key infrastructure elements.

FlowBuilder's capabilities may be particularly appealing to the community of Notes ISVs. With FlowBuilder their developers can more quickly port their Domino solutions to open standard platforms, achieve the performance and scalability advantages that these platforms provide, and significantly expand their markets with cross-platform support. As noted by Matthias Grossmann, CEO of IBS America, a leader in quality and compliance management solutions and long-time Notes ISV, FlowBuilder "allows us to build applications in J2EE with a high-level framework, just like Domino does, and we can still be productive with the same development staff."

While noting the power of FlowBuilder's migration capabilities, Jack Dausman still observes that "merely moving data out of Domino onto another application framework isn't what sets FlowBuilder 3.0 apart from a crowd of Web-application server competitors. What is equally appealing as its migration capabilities is the preservation of Domino's rapid development environment."

The full text of the review can be found at DominoPower Magazine's home site, at www.dominopower.com/issuesprint/issue200406/00001303.html.

About Trilog Group, Inc.

Trilog Group, Inc., is a pioneer in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), workflow, and enterprise integration for rapid development of standards-based, document-centric business process applications. The company's flagship product, FlowBuilder 3.0, is designed to address the needs of both Domino and Java developers by taking advantage of a full range of open standards such as J2EE, HTML, and XML. For Domino developers, FlowBuilder provides a bridge to J2EE for both their skills and Domino applications; for Java developers, it provides a higher-level development model for superior productivity in creating high quality collaborative solutions. FlowBuilder is powered by the company's innovative XML Server Pages technology that enables fast development of components for scalable, compatible, secure, and extensible development and deployment of Web applications.

Founded in 1997, privately held Trilog Group, is headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts. With FlowBuilder, leading global organizations such as J. Walter Thompson, Dana Corporation, and IBS America experience faster development and deployment times for their most strategic business applications. Trilog Group is available on the Web at www.flowbuilder.com.