Dodeca Architecture, Part 1

In my last post, I talked a bit about the Dodeca architecture and the patents pending on our design. I had our graphics designer come up with some nice looking graphics so I can talk a bit more about our design and expand on why architecture makes a difference. In the first post of this series, I am going to discuss the general architecture.

Dodeca has a three tier architecture.
The first tier, the Client Tier, is the Dodeca user interface. The user interface of Dodeca is built using Microsoft .NET technology. We chose this technology due to the strength of Windows on the desktop and the strategic importance that Microsoft has attached to .NET. Technically speaking, the user interface is classified as a .NET Smart Client. This means that the interface is highly interactive like a normal Windows application, however, all communications with the middle tier are via web services (xml transported via http). The Smart Client is delivered to the desktop via Microsoft ClickOnce technology which makes it easy to deploy to the desktop.

The Dodeca middle tier consists of two services, the Dodeca service and the Dodeca-Essbase service. The Dodeca service is responsible for handling metadata requests from the Dodeca client along with facilitating relational data transactions. The Dodeca-Essbase service is responsible for all Essbase interaction.

Finally, the data tier is typical in all modern systems. In Dodeca, the data tier stores not only the data that is displayed to the user, but it also stores all of the metadata that configures the application. All configuration settings including view/report properties, Essbase and SQL connections, point of view selectors, toolbars and even Excel templates, are literally stored in a relational database on the data tier.

In other posts in this series, I will expand on more of the architecture and benefits of each tier.