New Book announcement

[Chris Sharpington]

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NEW BOOK ANNOUCEMENT

RAPID APPLICATION GENERATION OF BUSINESS AND FINANCE SOFTWARE

SUKHDEV KHEBBAL AND CHRIS SHARPINGTON

Kluwer Academic Publishers, March 1996

ISBN: 0-7923-9707-X

The objectives of the work described in this book were twofold:

1) to capitalise on recent work in object-oriented 
   integration methods to build a Framework for rapid application
   generation of distributed client-server systems, using the same 
   API on both Microsoft Windows and on Unix
2) to use the Framework to generate real-world applications for
   intelligent data analysis techniques (neural networks and
   genetic algorithms) in Finance and Marketing

The key requirement was to be able to "plug and play" servers
i.e. unplug an Excel forecasting module and plug in a neural network 
forecasting tool to demonstrate the improved forecasting accuracy.

Four applications were built to prove the benefits of the Framework and
to demonstrate the value of intelligent techniques for improved data
analysis. The application descriptions are accessible to the business manager,
interested in the business issues involved, who may have little technical
knowledge of neural networks and genetic algorithms. At the same time,
technical experts can benefit from the examples of solving real-world
application issues. The applications are Direct Marketing (customer 
targeting and market segmentation), Financial Forecasting, 
Bankruptcy Predication, and Executive Information Systems.

Client-server computing has been attracting great interest of late.
However, a server does not have to be a database. The approach in this
work has been to standardise the interface to servers and collect a number
of different servers together into a Toolkit. Application generation
then becomes the rapid and simple process of plugging together the 
servers required (e.g. data retrieval, data analysis, data display)
with a client to control their interaction.

The emergence of object-oriented inter-application communication standards
such as Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) from Microsoft, and CORBA
from the Object Management Group, is fuelling great interest in 
distributed systems and their commercial benefits. An important 
contribution of this book is to detail and compare current inter-application
communication methods. This will be of great benefit in assessing the
potential of each communication method for business application and
in assessing the benefits of the HANSA Framework.

The work was carried out under Esprit project 6369 HANSA - a collaboration
between industrial and academic partners from four European countries,
with funding support from the European Commission. Having studied the 
technical details and illustrations of business value obtained from
the Framework, the reader is given details of how to obtain the software,
(for both Microsoft Windows and Unix) free of charge from an ftp site.

[ There is also a World Wide Web page on The HANSA project:
    http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/hansa ]

CONTENTS:
========

Chap 1: Rapid Application Development and the HANSA Project
	- Sukhdev Khebbal, University College London, UK. 
	- Chris Sharpington, CRL, Hayes, UK.

PART ONE: TOOLS FOR RAPID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
=================================================

Chap 2: The HANSA Framework
	- Sukhdev Khebbal and Jonthan Ladipo, University College London, UK. 

Chap 3: THE HANSA Toolkit and The MIMENICE tool
	- Eric LeSaint, MIMETICS, FRANCE.
	- Sukhdev Khebbal, University College London, UK.

PART TWO: OBJECT-ORIENTED INTEGRATION METHODS 
=============================================

Chap 4: Survey of Object-Oriented Integration Methods 
	- Sukhdev Khebbal and Jonthan Ladipo, University College London, UK. 

PART THREE: REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS
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Chap 5: Direct Marketing Application
	- Chris Sharpington, CRL, Hayes, UK.

Chap 6: Banking Application
	- Thomas Look and Michael Kuhn, IFS, Germany.

Chap 7: Bankruptcy Predication Application
	- Konrad Feldman, Jason Kingdon, Anoop Mangat, SearchSpace Ltd,
	  London. UK.
	- Renato Arisi, Orsio Romagnoli, O.Group, Rome. ITALY.

Chap 8: Executive Information Systems Application 
	- Pierre Charelain and Louis Moussy, Promind, FRANCE.

PART FOUR: DEVELOPING HYBRID SYSTEMS
====================================

Chap 9: Evaluating the HANSA Framework
	- Sukhdev Khebbal and Jonthan Ladipo, University College London, UK. 

Chap 10: Conclusion and Future Directions
	- Sukhdev Khebbal, University College London, UK. 
	- Chris Sharpington, CRL, Hayes, UK.

ISBN 0-7923-9707-X     212pp  HARDBOUND     March 1996 	

Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

TO ORDER THE BOOK
=================
 
Contact your local bookshop or supplier, or direct from the publisher
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Chris Sharpington  (chris at anvil.co.uk)
Anvil Software Ltd, 51-53 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3QQ
tel +44 171 729 8036    fax +44 171 729 5067