Uniface

Last Updated: 1st September 2023
Analyst Coverage: David Norfolk

Uniface B.V. has a long history, over several decades, since its initial inception in the Netherlands as a high productivity 4GL by Inside Automation. It became Uniface B.V., back in the 20th century. It was then acquired by Michigan-based Compuware Corp in 1994, but product development continued in Amsterdam and it was sold again, in 2014, to Marlin Equity Partners, becoming Uniface B.V. once again. It has always prided itself on supporting its existing customers using older versions of its products whilst modernising its product range as technology evolves and this company ethos has been maintained throughout its changes of ownership.

Uniface has now been acquired by Rocket Software. According to Rocket, “Rocket will apply its model of investment in strategic innovation to improve developer ease-of-use and end-user customer experience, unlocking the value of business-critical Uniface applications. Developers and users will benefit from Rocket’s increased R&D investment and vast developer resources, bringing Rocket’s extensive rapid application development experience to the Uniface low code application platform. Similarly, Uniface partners will benefit from Rocket’s thirty years of experience partnering with ISVs to deliver world-class applications through constant investments in innovation”.

Uniface was the first Compuware product set up as an independent Compuware business unit by Aad van Schetsen when he was Senior Vice President and Managing Director at Compuware. It became a growing and profitable business operation in its own right, even before the Marlin acquisition. Van Schetsen remains as President & General Manager of Uniface. He worked for Compuware in a variety of sales and management roles from 1992. Prior to Compuware, van Schetsen worked in multiple roles for the Canadian software company Cognos. He holds a software engineering degree from Technical University Delft and lives in the Netherlands.

Jim Byrnes was the first CEO of the new Uniface and maintained Uniface’s welcome customer focus; as he said: “More than anything, I care about our customers’ success and the relationships we’ve built with them. Only when our customers are successful are we successful”.

Uniface has a strong community. Its strong separation of business and presentation logic is supportive of this community as it facilitates modernisation of technology without altering business logic and vice versa. It has a LinkedIn page and is @uniface on Twitter.

Uniface is still being actively developed and modernised: it is currently evangelising the use of microservices, for example. Release 10.4 was announced at Uniface Universe 2021. We have always liked Uniface and look forward to following its development in its new home.

Company Info

Headquarters: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Telephone: +31 20 311 8800

Uniface

Last Updated: 1st September 2023
Mutable Award: Gold 2023

What is it?

Fig 1 - The Uniface Community Edition is an excellent way in for those new to Uniface

The DSP (Dynamic Server Page) framework is what Uniface uses to build full-stack, data-centric web applications that scale. It is data-centric, with built-in data synchronisation, binding and validation. It is low code, it does a lot of the work involved in communicating between the client and the server and synchronising data – it protects its developers from race conditions, protects read-only data, protects applications from SQL injection attacks and so on.

It also provides a rich Javascript API, for people mainly interested in JavaScript automation and who may not want to build full Uniface applications. Uniface allows developers a free hand with building their own web front ends.

Quotes

“More than anything I care about our customers’ success and the relationships we’ve built with them. Only when our customers are successful are we successful.”
Jim Byrnes, first CEO of the new Uniface in 2014

“Uniface was able to cut 60% of the 1.3 million lines of code estimated for the company’s next generation software, allowing it to install the new systems in under 3 years – compared to the 5 years quoted by Rocket’s competitors. Time savings from automating controls saved inspectors two days of work a month (10%) on average.”
A global French food distribution company

What does it do?

Fig 2 - Uniface has been a trusted platform for about four decades

Traditional Uniface-based desktop applications have been successful with Uniface’s loyal customers for many years but are now facing increased competition, from, for example: modern web UIs, the trend towards increased remote and home working with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device; perhaps this is better thought of as Bring Your Own Interface); and, of course, the move to cloud deployment at scale.

Uniface has been making an effort to ensure that its customers can enhance their applications with these latest approaches, without being disadvantaged with respect to their competitors, for a long while now. Its latest technology modernisations will make its customers’ new technology journeys even easier and once Rocket and Uniface have addressed customer retention, post-merger, these new Uniface features should help to attract new customers.

Local functions are available with component-level scope (callable from anywhere in the component); Entity/Occurrence-level scope (restricted to the Entity/Occurrence triggers as well as their direct fields); and Field-level scope (restricted to the field’s triggers).

Support for new widget functionality including an open API for integrating/creating complex custom widgets); and a Web component widget set which will be implemented using these; thus helping Uniface to deliver a consistent and accessible UX/UI.

Uniface now supports automatic layout generation and comes with a new reference web application, Docker support and an improved Cloud License Manager. Extending Uniface with central logging, auto scale and monitoring enable simple deployment into an Orchestrated environment.

A key issue is that you can’t simply translate a desktop application into a full-function enterprise web application. This is because a multi-user business application needs to be built on a firm foundation that makes it resistant to attacks from malicious parties (or even unintended user error). As Uniface says “Significant business risks would be introduced if an automated process were to convert a desktop application directly into an enterprise-scale web application”. Once the foundations are secure, business logic can be layered on top.

Uniface is particularly proud of its eLearning support, which is inspiring similar capabilities across Rocket. New eLearning modules will, of course, be created enabling the developers to understand and adopt the new functionality.

Why should you care?

To summarise, Uniface has identified several enhancements to the current DSP approach, the Uniface scripting language and the development environment, that it thinks will simplify development, increase application quality, and minimise the knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript needed to create a rich user experience.

These will increase a developer’s focus on the business logic generally, through simplifying application development and increasing productivity. They simplify and automate exception- and error-handling and ensure the Uniface system is left in a good known state, whether application exceptions are handled specifically or not.

The Bottom Line

The Uniface acquisition by Rocket seems very positive, and both companies have a similar customer focus. Uniface itself has been modernised, and this will help its customers modernise their own Uniface installations and then, perhaps, add new functions to other legacy applications.

Mutable Award: Gold 2023

Uniface IDE - An established visual development tool, now with a similar user experience to any other IDE

Last Updated: 15th March 2016

What it does

Uniface claims to be "the most productive, reliable and scalable development tool in the industry"; a claim that we think is probably justified - in the context of the needs and environments of the sort of enterprise customers that buy Uniface; although it is now facing competition from new Platform as a Service cloud tools. It is a high-productivity, model-driven, development platform for building enterprise-level mission critical applications. It allows organisations that want to work in this way (and we would see this as a very sensible choice), to develop at a high level of abstraction (technology independence), with very high productivity.

The latest version of Uniface is Uniface 10, which is currently (2016) available for new applications and Web development only (a further release, which will support migration fom previous versions of Uniface, will follow soon). It features a complete redesign of its User Experience. Uniface now claims to offer the same user experience and features as any other modern IDE.

However, the previous incarnation of Uniface is still supported, in Release 9.7, probably the last version of this technology. This has been modernised, to reduce barriers to implementation in a modern environment and support mobile applications. It lets you try out many of the features and technologies coming in Uniface 10, but these are mostly optional and users can continue with the old approaches if they want to. Regardless of what options you choose, Uniface 9.7 looks more modern than previous versions.

Uniface is almost unique amongst application development products in having consistently offered a migration path for its users - it now supports development for new technologies such as mobile, web and cloud, on most of the most widely used hardware platforms and operating environments. The company has remained true to its customer and partner base by migrating from character-based interfaces into GUIs and now to the web and Web 2.0 without forcing those clients to change their development tool. With the advent of the client/server revolution, virtually every other vendor (with only a few exceptions) built a brand new tool to serve the new marketplace and, effectively, abandoned its user base. Uniface has now evolved into a development IDE that supports the very latest service-oriented and web application approaches.

Uniface has always told a strong story around taking its customers forward as technology evolves, whether it used the term "legacy modernisation" or not. Modernising legacy is particularly attractive these days as demands from businesses to "do more with less" proliferate and Uniface now emphasises its legacy modernisation capabilities; it says that "Uniface allows developers to make better use of legacy resources by renewing and integrating their most mission critical applications for the Web". A Bloor White Paper describes a legacy modernisation methodology for use with Uniface (although it is also applicable generally). Uniface is particularly focused on modernising legacy applications with a mobile channel these days.

Markets and channels

Uniface generally targets large enterprises developing business automation solutions; and VAR partners, who also provide user- and issue-specific solutions.

Uniface used to belong to Compuware, but was sold to Marlin Equity Partners in 2014, with the current building in Amsterdam remaining the company headquarters. Uniface (which is developed in the Netherlands, whence it originated) already has a significant VAR community of more than 420 Business Alliance partners (some 60% of its customers), who tend to be solutions led.

A number of recent enhancements (for example, Windows 10 and rich GUI support, 24 x 7 support availability and easier deployment options) have been made at the behest of this VAR community and there is new focus in Uniface on the Channel and the place of VARs as intermediaries in the supply of Uniface-powered business services to end users; see PartnersUnited.

In particular, Uniface's own distributor network, which was once very strong, was all but dismantled under Compuware. Uniface is now making a major revamp of its distribution network, training distributors and so on; it sees resurrecting the channel as important for global sales, with distributors that really understand the local market.

Users

Uniface has thousands of companies and millions of people around the world depending on Uniface applications that may have been written at any time in the last two decades and Uniface supports them, both in their existing environments and as they upgrade or migrate to new ones.

Nevertheless, Uniface is also actively looking at new customers who want to modernise non-Uniface applications and can take advantage of its modular design and integration capabilities to quickly modernise user interfaces and rewrite key components rapidly in order to exploit new technologies - and, possibly, to manage new risks (particularly in the security area).

It is also worth commenting that when Uniface was part of Compuware a significant upturn in business from what one might call Java refugees, i.e. companies that have tried developing applications in Java and have failed. This number includes previous users of Uniface that have now returned to the Uniface fold.

Technology

Uniface uses a team development, model-driven, component-based development (CBD) approach that actually takes place in three phases: modelling, construction and assembly. The process normally starts with modelling, using Uniface's Graphical Model Viewer.

New features are available with the latest Uniface - including ribbon bars, dynamic user experiences and tight online integration with websites such as Facebook, Google or Salesforce.com. Uniface provides out-of-the-box Rich Internet Application (RIA), support of which should make the underlying modernisation of legacy GUIs and the componentisation of legacy systems with Web Services straightforward and it provides particularly good support for two key areas of modernisation: localisation and encryption.

The Uniface application model is, in effect, a combination of a data model together with business events and their triggers. It is built using the Model Editor and embodies elements such as entities, indexes, relationships, referential integrity, business rules, event processing, date validation and formatting, calculations and so forth. This may take a little longer up-front during the development process as you build the model (mostly because you have to think about what you are doing before actually doing it) but this should reduce subsequent maintenance.

Uniface now lets you build applications with a much more modern UI, exploiting (for example) Portable Network Graphics (PNG), new "sexier" buttons (even in existing apps) and new tab designs.

Uniface supports 'Enterprise Mashups' (a mashup is a composite web application that typically includes links to external applications such as Google Maps), which offer an efficient approach to some types of modernisation. Uniface's centralised architecture allows you to provide a library of quality-assured shared components for mashups and lets end users safely build new services from them in the mashup layer. These automatically have "AA" (mass audience) level W3C Accessibility compliance, an important aspect of modernisation.

Uniface now supports the native deployment of Uniface clients on 64 bit Windows, which eases the implementation of the 64 bit modernisation strategies now being followed by many organisations. Support for mobile and hand-held devices via Wi-Fi, GPRS and Bluetooth is browser-based with database support provided via the Uniface Polyserver on all supported platforms and database combinations.

"Rich clients" can be deployed on the latest versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows (XP and later) theme support. Uniface JTi is a deployment solution for modernising Uniface client/server applications on the web, whilst maintaining a rich client/server user interface.

Services

Uniface has a strong professional services organisation, offering consultancy and training, and has some 96 offices worldwide, in 32 countries. There has been a focus on the 'productisation' of Professional Services and the delivery of 'value add' service offerings. The 'services products' can be grouped into several areas:

Design and Development, offerings geared towards application delivery;
Build and Deploy, offerings based around development practices and methodologies;
Maintenance and Modernisation, devoted to helping existing customers get the most from their Uniface investment and, finally;
Education services, providing instructor-led training via the cloud, in the classroom, or through online web based training.

Uniface is taking especial care to build an online community around Uniface, with resources such as its blog and the "Uniface University" (the latter is currently, 03/2016, offline as Uniface modernises its online educational offerings).

Uniface also has a strong partner ecosystem - see PartnersUnited.

Commentary

Uniface rides on a Rocket

Uniface 10

High-productivity Software Development

New Uniface, a roadmap

The new Uniface

Uniface leaves Compuware

Solutions

Uniface
Uniface IDE - An established visual development tool, now with a similar user experience to any other IDE

Research

00002770 - MODERNISATION UNIFACE Spotlight (cover thumbnail)

Modernisation with modern tools empowers you to do more with less - And modernisation thrives on modern approaches, such as Low Code and AI

Modernisation is better than rip and replace, taking advantage of Low Code, AI (Augmented Intelligence), DevOps etc.

Uniface

Company Info

Uniface

What is it?

What does it do?

Why should you care?

Uniface IDE - An established visual development tool, now with a similar user experience to any other IDE

What it does

Markets and channels

Users

Technology

Services

Commentary

Solutions

Research

Modernisation with modern tools empowers you to do more with less - And modernisation thrives on modern approaches, such as Low Code and AI

Uniface - A modernised low-code platform

Modernisation with modern tools empowers you to do more with less

Low-Code/No-Code Development