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1.3 Other Great Things about WAMs

There are other powerful advantages to adopting LANSA's WAM technology. In the Presentation Layer these include:

• Industry standard architecture: WAMs are based on industry standard technologies including XML and XSL.  This ensures that your WAM applications are open and flexible.
• An editor: the LANSA Editor lets you "paint" your WAM's User Interface using point-and-click.  When more power is needed, the UI can be edited at source code level with round-trip support, i.e. you can edit the source code and then revert to using the LANSA Editor for further work.
• Shipped and user-definable "Weblets": Weblets are XSL-based components used for encapsulating common field visualizations and other User Interface elements.  Weblets are designed to promote re-use in the Presentation Layer.  LANSA ships with a range of ready-to-use Weblets for common User Interface elements, but you can also build your own.

In the Application Logic Layer, WAMs exploit and build on much of LANSA's traditional application development strengths:

• Repository-based: LANSA's repository-based approach to application development captures business rules and domain knowledge and ensures that it is consistently applied throughout an application.
• Component-based: in LANSA parlance, WAMs are components and are capable of making use of other LANSA components.  This offers the potential for you to build upon the repository-based approach and further extend the separation between business rules, Application Logic and the User Interface.  You can build common business logic components that can be shared between browser-based applications, rich-client applications and integration projects.
• Single skill set: the Application Logic for WAMs is built using the same RDML programming language that is used throughout LANSA.  For example, LANSA developers with 5250 green screen backgrounds can quickly and easily learn how to produce sophisticated web browser-based applications.

Let's now look more closely at the key components of the Application Logic and Presentation Layers.
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