LongJump is a development platform for creating composite, information management applications available behind the firewall. I recently spoke with Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump. This is his third startup. LongJump began in 2003 and remains profitable without venture funding. Their core business is to offer their platform to mid to large size ISVs who take applications to market. However, they have built and sold their own applications. They also provide an on demand product and a CRM tool for the media industry. Pankaj said that 116 major US newspapers use the CRM tool for marketing and sales support.

We began with the major issues facing ISVs who want to develop web-based applications. These firms generally have niche expertise that they want to put into software. They do not want to re-invent the technology wheel. LongJump gives them a platform that allows them to focus on their own core competencies and accelerate their time to market. ISVs can use the platform to create a variety of web-based situational and composite applications with reusable data objects. Each application has a complete user interface and provides connectivity to industry standard methods for information exchange.

Organizing information into structured data objects is the fundamental step in creating most applications on LongJump. Using LongJump, you can quickly design a data model on the web by using the browser interface to create objects, manipulate fields and relate information. Once the data model is created, LongJump enables you to add additional automated processing to information that executes when data is added, changed, or scheduled. This enables you to specify information that triggers other actions to take place such as validating information, executing a workflow, sending an email, changing data, or some custom Java process. Here is a sample screen for creating workflows.

LongJump comes with a number of intelligent objects that are the building blocks for applications. For example, the presentation layer has dashboards, views, reports, printing, and forms layout. The processing layer has policies, notification, validation, workflows, calendaring, project and task management, email integration, and document management, the administration layer has security, permissions, LDAP single sign-on, activity and change log, data management, and customization. The development layer has browser-based IDE, Java-based API, Rest & SOAP/WSDL API, JSP/HTML, Scripting, I+UI design overrides, Eclipse, and app packaging. The intelligent objects can be assembled and reused across applications. Here is a sample screen for creating forms.

The built-in view and report designer provides a wizard for users to create and manage their own reports. LongJump also enables multiple data sets to be filtered across tables or joined to form additional reporting schema. Once reports are created, users can add them to their dashboards for easy visibility into operational status. Here is a sample report for the CRM application.

When more complex or comprehensive customization is needed, LongJump provides a suite of developer tools to handle forms, manipulate data, run custom processes or actions, or even write native user interface elements. All tools are standard Java or Javascript syntax so there is no new language to learn.

The instances of an application can be easily ported so you can test in any environment. It also allows for automated testing. You can also use third party automated testing tools and application visualization to speed the development process. Nightly builds allow for continuous testing. The develop instance becomes the QA instance and then becomes the production instance so there are not surprises at the end of development. This feature allows for a single code base for both on premise and on demand versions of the applications. In addition, applications can be packaged for migration from one LongJump deployed instance to another. For example, development can take place in a cloud deployment and be deployed in production in a corporation’s data center.

Pankaj showed me a sample user interface for application development. We looked at an asset management application. You can quickly design the applications, select and apply features, and install rules. You can create different formats for viewing components and re-arrange them, can change the rules for their operation and who can access them. For example a rule about which computers can be leased, automatically governs how leasing data is displayed. If you need new objects, they can be easily created. During the interview, we developed a storage objects to go with the asset management application. You can also write you own Java code to extend what comes out of the box. There are also language translation capabilities in a range of languages. Here is the translation workbench.

I can certainly see the benefit fit of using a platform such as LongJump to create web-based applications. LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and catalog out of the box intelligent objects can reduce the time and cost of developing and delivering data-driven applications. The business building block approach should allow developers and corporate IT teams to reduce the time to market or deployment, since they can bypass the need to repeatedly recreate common business processes and functions, as well as develop basic web functionality. This all makes sense to me.