Nexaweb Technologies has announced the Nexaweb Reference Framework, a new addition to its flagship Enterprise Web Suite, engineered to reduce the time, costs, and architectural decisions associated with modernizing business applications and bringing them to the Web.

The Nexaweb Reference Framework offers customers a set of development constructs that form the foundation of applications. Its design frees application teams to take a top-down approach to application modernization, meaning they can focus on innovation at the business logic, workflow, and user-interface levels. This approach has proven to reduce the time and costs required to transform Sybase PowerBuilder, Microsoft Visual Basic, Oracle Forms, and other 3GL/4GL-based applications by as much as 67% in early customer implementations.

Complementing a service oriented architecture (SOA), the Nexaweb Reference Framework de-couples application business logic from middle-tier technologies. This allows information technology (IT) professionals to view application assets as components that can be developed and maintained separate from data and infrastructure elements of an application and its parent portfolio.

The Nexaweb Reference Framework's constructs offer basic assumptions about a customer's target architecture and facilitate a modular application development model. The framework's target architecture is based on JavaEE version 1.4 and the Spring Framework for managing business logic objects and data integration. It supports pluggable Object Relational Mapping technologies including Struts, iBATIS and Hibernate. Other constructs include navigation and menu structures, messaging configurations, Web Services APIs, and database protocols.

New features and capabilities in Nexaweb's flagship Enterprise Web Suite 5.0 include upgraded support for the Eclipse IDE v.3.3, support for dojo.E and the dojo toolkit v.1.1, an expanded widget library, and enhanced Web service and database APIs. The Nexaweb Reference Framework and version 5.0 of the Nexaweb Enterprise Web Suite will be generally available on December 15, 2008.