Over the past two years Innovatis focused intensively on Java, particularly on Sun's J2EE architecture. Innovatis' J4e web application development platform is built on J2EE. J4e is designed to work in conjunction with open source products to minimize the heavy workload developers face in realizing web-based e-Business applications in heterogeneous environments.

The Innovatis Group has been using Java for many years to develop software for a variety of applications and practically all of our current software projects are Java based. Some of our past projects were:

• Architecture and implementation of a B2B e-Business application for a leading Swiss investment bank.
• Technical design and realization of business logic components in finance for a company active in wealth management.
• Realization of a complex application for analysis and visualization of financial research data.
• Design and implementation of VDF, a financial data feed from Telekurs AG.

Thanks to extensive project experience, Innovatis has acquired development expertise in the following areas:

• Internet security
• Performance optimizing, scalability and fail-over
• Database query parsing
• SQL generation
• Graphic editors and visualizations
• Parsers and translators for data feed processing and data cleansing
• Development of multi-threaded servers
• Extensive intranet application-GUIs

Innovatis has used the following products, technologies and APIs that in past projects:

• Apache Tomcat
• JBoss Application Server
• XML and XSL
• Sun's J2EE Specification and corresponding APIs
• ULC, a "Thin Client" development framework and API
• JDBC
• SQLJ

Consistent focus on widely-used and accepted open technologies and specifications ensures Innovatis software remains virtually platform independent. Therefore there is no absolute requirement to use the above mentioned products (i.e. Tomcat, JBoss, et al.), which can be treated as interchangeable components.

In terms of database systems, Innovatis also follows a project implementation stragegy that favors a platform independent solution whenever possible and reasonable for the given environment. We achieve this by using ANSI, SQL92 and XML for database schemas and data loading scripts.

Innovatis pays special attention to the development process and development tools. We use the following development tools:

• CVS (Concurrent Version System), a standardized software version-management repository, which is used in practically all major open source projects.
• Apache Ant, a Java-based build and configuration management tool.
• CruiseControl, a web-based tool for supporting an on-going integration processes. CruiseControl combines CVS and Ant and after a CVS commit, adjoins the complete build process. Developers can check on the status of changed files or build issues by accessing reports on the CruiseControl Intranet site.
• JUnit, a Java based Unit-Test Framework.
• Idea, an extremely powerful and flexible Java development environment. Idea's special strength lies in its innumerable source-code refactoring tools and simple integration to Ant and CVS.