Declarative business processing engine

At the heart of the Factonomy technologies lies an extensible XML processing engine with unparalleled capabilities to deliver business systems that include information retrieval and storage, workflow based business processing, web and mobile presentation layers, document centric information delivery and integration with all legacy systems. This is achieved through the use of pre-built data and web-services connectors and the ability to create new connectors via and Microsoft .NET common library runtime.

Factonomy's XML-based approach is unlike traditional procedural languages and beyond code generation languages. The use of declarative XML enables business analysts to create powerful applications by declaring the desired outcomes without a need to understand the detailed code required to effect the necessary storage, retrieval, processing and presentation.

One of the earliest examples of a declarative approach to business solutions was the invention of the SQL syntax and the well known runtime engines that now implement these. Prior to RDBMS systems from Oracle, Microsoft and MySQL, it was common for developers to spend very significant parts of a project developing code to store and index information on disk and to retrieve and organise this information in memory.

Most business systems today include elements of interacting with data in back-end systems, presenting information to workers and collecting new data and instructions from workers and then running business processes sometimes immediately and at other times over longer running workflows.

Developers still spend large parts of their day building individual blocks of code that address each of these tasks whilst more of the day is used to worry how such modules can be put together to form a robust solution. Development managers use vast resourses to ensure each module is tested for every possible scenario whilst the “glue” that brings the modules together is often left to the end of the project and cannot be tested in the same way.