Integrating with Other Technologies

The Uniface architecture enables you to integrate Uniface and non-Uniface components in a single application, and to deploy the application on a large variety of platforms and technologies.

Integrating with Third-Party Components

To integrate different technologies, Uniface supports:

  • Call-out to third-party components—Uniface applications can call operations or methods on third-party components, such as Web services, .NET, and C applications, via interface definitions (called signatures) that specify the component's operations and parameters. Uniface supports call-out to DBMS stored procedures, operating system commands, C, .NET (via COM), and SOAP.
  • Call-in from third-party applications—other applications can call in to Uniface via APIs and connectors. Uniface supports call-in from C, .NET (via COM), Java, and Web services.
  • Embedding OCX and OLE controls into Uniface components

Most call-in and call-out is handled by the Universal Request Broker (URB), which is the Uniface interface. The URB relies on a number of Uniface software engines, servers, services, and driver interfaces to ensure the successful operation of the runtime environment.

Uniface provides tools for importing, exporting, and defining component signatures, which define the interfaces of both Uniface and non-Uniface components.

The documentation in this collection describes how to integrate Uniface with third-party products and technologies (except for platforms and databases, which are covered in other collections). It provides general information on Uniface call-in and call-out, before covering specific technologies.

Integrating with Databases

Another type of integration is the ability to connect to different data sources. Via its database connectors, Uniface can maintain data in databases that support DML, including all leading relational databases and ODBC. For more information, see DBMS Support.

Data Execution Protection

Third-party components that are integrated into Uniface applications must support the Data Execution Protection (DEP) policy. The DEP policy protects against attacks from web pages that insert executable code into data and then exploit some browser security hole to get that code to run.

Do not rely on the DEP policy being off. It is automatically turned on when Uniface renders HTML (for example in the HTML widget), but it may also be turned on by your machine administrator to comply with a change in your company's security policy, or it may be turned on in the future by Uniface because of a change in Uniface's security policy.

It is highly recommended that you upgrade all third-party components to the latest versions available.