touchbase

Touchbase is an application framework designed to provide the building blocks necessary for creating modern communications and productivity tools. Built on the OSGi microkernel specification, touchbase is a “plug-n-play” architecture for application development, which also alleviates the need for you to build many of your own service components.

Design Principles

The core principles behind the touchbase architecture include design concepts that are quickly becoming recognised as essential to the development of reliable, maintainable, and robust software.

• Loose coupling – through the use of OSGi declarative services touchbase can minimise dependencies between specific implementations. Components are “wired together” by the OSGi container, meaning that implementations of components and service may be seamlessly interchanged, thus maximising the configurability of modules.
• Augmentation – a key failure of many frameworks is the attempt to hide the underlying technology from the developer such that they are forced to use framework concepts exclusively. In theory this practice appears sound, however in practice we find there are specific needs that require access to lower-level functionality. Touchbase makes no attempt to hide the technology on which it is built (not least as it would be near impossible to do so!), but rather augments the functionality provided by OSGi, Swing, etc. filling in the blanks only where necessary.

Core Modules

The entire touchbase framework consists of a collection of OSGi bundles, each providing specific functionality and services. Dependencies between bundles are minimised where possible in order to minimise the required framework bundles.

• Bootstrap
• Core
• Scheduler
• Preferences
• User Interface
• Web
• Preferences UI
• Workbench
• Views
• Alerts
• Tray Icon
• Look And Feel

Touchbase Views

Touchbase Views is the combination of the Knopflerfish OSGi implementation with core touchbase modules to produce a suite of productivity and communication tools.