Rogue Wave's zApp Application Framework

A Better Way to Program

Forget about writing hundreds of lines of code to bring up a memo field, draw a graph, or even to just open a window and display a form. With zApp, it is already written, debugged and optimized. Since the functionality needed for your application is provided in zApp, your final source is approximately a tenth of the size it would have been.

zApp achieves these benefits by presenting the programmer with a set of over two hundred prefabricated object classes. These classes provide the functionality you need to easily create powerful applications--graphical interfaces (windows, scroll bars, check boxes, toolbars, and more), dialogs, forms, graphics support, data collection services, menus, fonts, clipboard support, bitmaps, memory management, size and positioning services--leaving you free to write the code that makes your application unique.

With zApp you can write sophisticated applications that incorporate all the modern features without ever touching a raw platform API. Not only does this save you countless hours of learning and coding to an API, but it makes your code single-source compatible. You might think you have to trade performance for this kind of ease-of-use. Not so. Because zApp objects are highly optimized, there is no appreciable difference in performance between zApp programs and programs written directly to the API.

zApp is not merely a wrapper around a platform's API. It incorporates vast functionalty beyond the scope of native API's. For instance, zApp allows you to easily create toolbars and status lines, perform automatic input validation, and store objects to disk portably (object persistence)...on all the platforms zApp supports.

Portablity Across the Platforms of Today... and Tomorrow

Above all, zApp makes complete single-source portable software development a reality.

As the diagram above illustrates, zApp acts as a buffer between you and the underlying API. This means that your code does not have to make direct API calls--zApp does that. So, to port your application from one platform to another, you simply recompile with the version of zApp for that platform. This means that zApp applications are completely native to each platform they are run on.

If you have additional questions, please feel free to contact zApp Technical Support.