Developing distributed service-oriented applications has never been as easy and cost-effective as with DatumNode Service. There are three main tasks in developing with DatumNode: building information system architecture in terms of DatumNode (e.g. solutions, projects, entities and commands), building client applications and then configuring service and clients (setting up security permissions, configuring end points).

Architecture Development

First you must determine the subject area of future system and give it some meaningful name. In terms of DatumNode Service it is called solution (or subsystem). After creating solution you must know all the main goals it is intended to achieve. Another step is to decompose solution into separate functional blocks – projects. In most cases projects will represent applications that will carry out one or more problem of subject area. Projects deal with set of business objects – entities. After creating a project you must determine and describe all of its entities. Then you must define commands for each entity – you must describe all operations that can be applied to entity. Commands represent queries or store procedures of any supported data sources. A signal entity can have commands corresponding to different data sources- it is completely transparent for clients and makes architecture extremely flexible. And the final step is to create at least one data source.

Client application development

There are two main scenarios of building client applications: development on .NET platform and on any other. In the case of .NET it is preferred to use DatumNode Service as WCF Service – this will greatly simplify the development and you will have an opportunity to take all the advantages that WCF provides. DatumNode Service supports auto code generation which greatly simplifies application development. This makes using DatumNode Service extremely easy: you must first choose what objects will be used in your application, press button "generate" (this is made in DatumNode Explorer) and then use auto-generated class in your project by creating the instances of this class, setting parameters (if any) and executing one of its methods.
In the case of developing on some alternative platform (for example, Java) you must use DatumNode Service as a traditional web-service. In this scenario you execute one of few methods of web-service which takes the request string as an input parameter (almost any environment which supports web-services has some utility for generation of proxy class, wrapping the details of working with web-services).

Configuring DatumNode Service

Before using DatumNode Service in the production environment you must accomplish at least two tasks: setting up security permissions of DatumNode objects and configuring transport protocols. Build on WCF infrastructure DatumNode Service offers a great variety of supporting protocols. Your choice will depend mostly on the platform of client applications. In case of .NET platform your can use any protocol and security scenario that WCF supports. When using DatumNode Service as a web-service you can use only HTTP (or WS-HTTP) protocol.