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For more information about our Rapid Application Development Studio services & solutions, please contact:

Robin Caputo
VP, Marketing

Professional Edition  |  Lite Edition  |  Side-by-Side Comparison

CIBER created and maintains a portfolio of products which enable rapid application software development. We call the portfolio "RADS". It comes in two editions -- Professional and Lite. The RADS portfolio is a feature rich add-on software product that works in conjunction with the Unisys BIS¹ operating environment. RADS enables quick and cost-effective design and deployment of BIS-powered applications in a Web browser or GUI window on desktop or laptop PCs and PC servers, Unisys enterprise servers -- in Microsoft Windows, SUSE Linux, Red Hat Linux, Sun Solaris, and naturally, on proprietary Unisys ClearPath mainframes.

RADS -- The Fast Track to Building Highly Functional Business Applications or Modernizing Legacy BIS Applications

As an integrated development environment, BIS is incredibly powerful, but BIS programmers require advanced tools to accelerate application development as well as improve application functionality. RADS adds to the soul of BIS by providing a better way to build new contemporary, user-friendly applications as well as modernize and maintain older ones. It accomplishes this by streamlining the design-develop-test-deploy process and by enhancing team collaboration. RADS streamlines programming by producing both Windows GUI and Web browser screens from a single development effort. RADS stores screen definitions (rather than program code) and separates the user interface and business logic layers of an application in order to reduce development and maintenance costs.

The end result -- with RADS, programmers are able to build applications more quickly, assemble powerful solutions easily, and deliver high-performance business applications on time and at/below budget.

Professional Edition

RADS Professional enables quick and cost-effective development and deployment of business applications in either a Web or GUI environment. RADS Professional screens are dynamic, often built with data from multiple sources, and transformed into meaningful business information. Built-in features like Report Tools allow for operations like ad hoc queries, data manipulation, and charting -- all without programming. As a bonus, the ICEME² functions in RADS Professional allow ad hoc data access and manipulation of an existing BIS database through a Web browser. ICEME functions provide a quick and simply way to create high-quality reports and charts from a BIS database, as well as external data sources. With ICEME, even novice end-users can produce customized reports through an easy-to-use point-and-click interface. More advanced "power users" have tools to perform even more sophisticated analysis such as searching, calculating, subtotaling, and charting thanks to the user-friendliness of ICEME.

Download the RADS Professional Edition Brochure (PDF, 238KB)

Lite Edition

RADS Lite is a subset of RADS Professional. And, like RADS Professional, RADS Lite is an incredibly powerful tool set for building highly functional GUI and/or Web applications with minimal program code, and best of all, RADS Lite handles all the complex HTML and JavaScript coding. RADS Lite builds screens and reports primarily with simple point and click wizards, and automatically handles all screen presentation, input validation, and error messages.

Despite being an entry-level product, RADS Lite is still very feature rich. It contains everything a BIS programmer needs to create report displays, data entry screens and other application services, with very easy to use development tools. When more advanced application features are required, like Drill Down functionality or SQL database access for example, it's easy to upgrade to RADS Professional.

Download the RADS Lite Brochure (PDF, 362KB)

Side-by-Side Feature Comparison of
RADS Professional and RADS Lite

¹ BIS - Business Information Server (formerly known as "MAPPER"). BIS is an application development language and database management system created and maintained by the Unisys Corporation. The language is typically classified as a fourth-generation programming language. BIS helps programmers to develop applications, optionally using its own tightly integrated database and programming tools. BIS-powered applications are portable across most modern computing systems and allow access to various popular data sources without having to learn the underlying data access methods.

² ICEME - Web-enable interface for BIS environments. ICEME (developed by CIBER) is the Web-based equivalent of Unisys' PCME (Point-and-Click MAPPER Environment) software. PCME (also developed by CIBER) provides the Windows GUI end-user experience found in BIS. Because ICEME and PCME look and behave in the same manner, the cost to train end-users is reduced.