wIntegrate 6.1 Released

IBM® wIntegrate® 6.1 delivers connection resilience, enhanced reporting capabilities, performance and presentation improvements as well as increased interoperability. Further customer enhancements provide additional value for solutions providers.

Connection Resilience
wIntegrate 6.1 offers resilient connectivity between its thin clients and the wIntegrate Server. Increasing mobility of clients connecting over the Internet can increase the number of dropped connections. Connection resilience gives thin clients the ability to reconnect to the wIntegrate Server and recover customer access to applications and data without administrator intervention.

Enhancements to the wIntegrate Administrator and Monitor components allow flexible configuration and management of resilient connections. The Administrator's log file includes details of lost and recovered connections.

Enhanced Reporting
QueryBuilder is a powerful forms-based report generation component of wIntegrate. wIntegrate 6.1 provides significant usability enhancements to this key feature. When entering dates in QueryBuilder selection criteria, customers can use the new pre-defined date definitions to easily specify dates such as "today", "lastmonth" and "nextyear". The actual values are resolved at run-time allowing saved queries to be re-used for different dates without having to change the parameters manually.

Customers can modify or create their own field definitions using wIntegrate's powerful scripting language. QueryBuilder dialog boxes have also been enhanced to include arrows to allow you to easily rearrange items, selection criteria or output fields. Finally, improvements to error handling enhance the user experience with this feature-rich utility.

Performance
The Java Thin Client deployment option was added at version 6 to provide the ability to run wIntegrate as a signed Java applet in a Web browser on Windows, Linux and Mac clients. By caching wIntegrate dialogs and adding a parameter to disable the Nagle algorithm, wIntegrate 6.1 improves performance up to forty percent for the Java Thin Client. This speed increase will improve usability and accelerate user adoption of this user interface enhancement functionality.

Presentation
The ability to improve the presentation layer of your application with minimal code modifications is a key benefit of wIntegrate. Version 6.1 continues to modernize the look and feel in a number of areas. The Java Thin Client has improved tab controls and roll over buttons to allow developers to provide the most modern look and feel.

Interoperability
In the Web 2.0 world of application mash-ups, the wIntegrate Java applet provided by the thin client must interoperate and play nicely with HTML pages and even other applets in a modern Web application. The ability for wIntegrate to send and receive messages via JavaScript provides two-way links between HTML in the browser and the U2 host, so an enterprise application can both affect and react to events in the browser and other applets. This functionality allows sophisticated application design and functionality.

In addition to interoperating with HTML and other applets, the Java thin client can interoperate with Windows Tools such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word by leveraging the OLE interface. This new capability extends compatibility with Windows and lets you leverage QueryBuilder to create custom reports and perform mail merges or populate spreadsheets in this environment.

Customer Enhancements
wIntegrate 6.1 delivers numerous customer enhancements designed to empower business solutions based on the IBM U2 data servers.

In order to extend the language support of the wIntegrate local client, version 6.1 has improved support for Far-Eastern languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Traditional Chinese.

wIntegrate thin clients now have extended support for authentication using Windows Active Directory allowing them to login to trusted domains in the same forest. This leverages Active Directory central management of authorization easing system administration workload.