There are two halves to the portal: the portal engine supports the extensible data-driven development approach, and the portal libraries provide a comprehensive set of metadata to develop solutions.
Read a summary of the portal features.
Portal engine
The portal engine provides everything you need to develop and run applications. It runs on the web and you only need a web browser to develop or run any portal solution.
The portal engine has a user interface which is connected to a data store and processing engine through a service layer.
Data
Data is the heart of the system.
The data store is very flexible and can hold data in any structure. As well as holding business data, it holds metadata that describes the business data and how it is processed.
The data includes definitions of users and permissions, providing built-in, reliable data security. Data is version controlled, which allows solutions to evolve in a controlled manner.
Service
The service layer provides a simplified interface into the data store. It also provides back-end features that can be integrated into solutions, such as file storage and email.
The service layer can be accessed through a secure web service interface. Any data or processing in the portal can be securely accessed through web services. See Metrici integration for more details.
User interface
The user interface accesses the data store through the service layer. It uses the metadata to build the user interface.
The metadata that defines solutions is stored and maintained like any other data in the portal. This means that you can use the portal both to create solutions and then run solutions.
Processing
Additional processing capability is added by the processing components.
If you need to add custom logic, the processing engine provides a comprehensive JavaScript environment including a rich API, interaction with the service layer, and script library support. Scripts are sandboxed to make sure they cannot break data security rules. Scripts are stored in the data.
The engine provides advanced processing components, such as scheduling, triggers that responding to data changes, and automatic updates of calculated data.
Multiple tenants
The engine is designed from the ground up to be used by multiple organisations, each in their own secure account.
This makes the portal very cost-effective: you only pay for what you use, not for the whole environment.
You can create your own secure account in less than 60 seconds.
This makes the portal a very good choice for delivering software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to multiple customers, or to provide solutions across multiple independent business units.
Portal libraries
How metadata works
The engine understands only simple metadata, which we call system metadata. To extend this metadata, the portal has mechanisms to build system metadata from high-level data metadata, rather like how a compiler builds CPU instructions from a high-level progamming language. This allows the system metadata to be extended to cover more complicated requirements. Multiple layers of metadata can be built up to provide high-level components that can be used to build complex solutions very quickly.
The high-level metadata is split into multiple libraries.
Libraries
The portal libraries provide metadata to build a wide variety of solutions. Each library supports a different subject area, such as data definition, account handling, file handling, security, web services, translation, and so on.
View the libraries to see what features are supported.
To create a solution, you include, configure and combine metadata from the libraries. The libraries are all built to the same pattern and all integrate seamlessly which allows you to combine them any way you need.
Metadata holds descriptive text which provides automatic documentation, and metadata can be examined to quickly understand how a solution is put together and how to use it. Most solutions can be built using only the library metadata and can be developed an order-of-magnitude faster than conventional code-based development.
Some solutions need features that are not supported by the libraries, such as custom calculations or special displays. The library metadata will still provide 90%-99% of the solution, and you can extend the library metadata or write new metadata for just the additional features.
The portal also provides fully-featured products which you can install into your account and which can form the basis of your solutions. This includes tools to help system development projects, user features such as forums, and an advanced peer-to-peer collaboration environment which supports secure, collaborative workflows across multiple organisations and is the basis of the Relay Work Smart service.
Contact us to discuss your requirements and how we can help you deliver them using Metrici Portal.