Gellyn

Lynas Framework

The Lynas Application Framework (LAF) is a collection of enterprise-grade, reusable software libraries for building secure, compliant, database driven, scale-able web and mobile software applications. LAF allows software developers to focus most of their time in building the business logic instead of building the infrastructure.

By leveraging the LAF software libraries and best practices in test driven software engineering, automated testing and operations, we can rapidly develop and deploy enterprise grade web and mobile software applications. LAF has been built and continuously enhanced by us over a decade to leverage the best-of-breed technologies. 

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The Lynas Application Framework provides the following key benefits:

• Built-in, enterprise-grade security and compliance

• Low total cost of development, maintenance and operations

• Increased focus on business logic, lower infrastructure risk, and faster time to deployment.

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LAF has reduced our total cost of software application development and maintenance by 30 to 60 percent compared to projects where we have built applications from the ground up. 

Key Features

• Meta-data driven reusable, extensible software components. This means that most of the common functionality across different data will share the same code, thereby ensuring faster development cycles, better quality and intuitive user experience

• Cross-platform on the server (Windows, Linux / Unix, Docker Containers) and on the client. All popular desktop and mobile browsers supported on all popular operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows). Easily extensible to support hybrid mobile applications on iOS, Android and Windows

• Multiple database support (SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL), optional support for NoSQL databases

• Service Oriented Architecture, Secure, REST APIs for fast and easy integrations

• Stateless server process that allows easy horizontal scale-out and load-balancing

• Deployment-ready in public cloud (Amazon, Azure, Google, RackSpace,…), on premise or hybrid

• Built-in support for role-based security, audit trails, optional encryption, single sign-on (Active Directory, OpenID Connect)

• Optional support for multi-tenancy

• Configurable secure bulk data import/export

• Support for ad-hoc and configurable reports that allow users to export data

• Uniform, intuitive, easy to use, user interface screens for easy navigation by users

• Built on popular open source languages, frameworks and tools, no commercial vendor dependencies.

  • Server side: Go language used for cloud-scale server applications (uses about 1/10th memory and CPU for web server applications compared to Java and .NET based server applications, open source language originated at Google).

  • Client side: HTML, JavaScript, ReactJS (used for large-scale JavaScript client applications, open source framework originated at Facebook), native applications for mobile. 

• Full source code available, including proprietary Lynas framework along with some popular, free, commercially usable open source libraries

• Test-driven development, 95+% test coverage in framework components

• Automation-ready development and build environment for agile development, testing, continuous integration, delivery, deployment and operations

Data Security and Privacy Compliance

Lynas Application Framework supports role based, configurable access control where administrators can choose which roles allow creating, reading, editing or deleting of data. Framework can optionally support audit trails for data access to track any access to important data (example: personally identifiable information) to meet compliance requirements. Data access can also be limited hierarchically, based on school districts, schools, classes, etc. for easier administration.

Throughout the design, development and operational phases of the application, our engineers will ensure that the security and compliance are core parts of the process.  

The Lynas Framework supports processes that impose tight controls over who can access which elements of the data. For example: software engineers developing an application must always work with mock databases with simulated data. All the development, troubleshooting and testing by the engineers will be done using mock databases or copies of log files that list execution stack traces, without actually showing the live user data. Engineers will not have any back-door access to live data about the students and users.

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Lynas Application Framework allows the software application to be released as a single package of binary files with almost no outside dependencies other than the host operating system. That means that the LAF application can be deployed and upgraded without worrying about conflicting or corrupted third-party DLLs or runtimes. All the migration files, including database SQL migration scripts will be controlled in a secure, master source control system to ensure that the production environment is 100% reproducible and supportable.

Application servers developed using the Lynas Application Framework support deploying parallel instances of the servers on two to an infinite number of application servers. This allows operation administrators infinite capacity to scale out the application for load-balancing when the number of users increase. Load-balancing can also help the application servers optionally integrate with high-availability public cloud load-balancers (example: Amazon AWS) or Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers for advanced protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Software Quality Automation

Lynas Application Framework and our software development processes follow best-practices for developing highest quality web and mobile software applications.  The framework and all the custom software application components have matching test code. Test code is written at a function level as soon as the main function is ready for use. This sequence allows several iterations of the main function to ensure that the intended functionality is working before writing code to test that functionality. 

Once the software engineer completes a specific functionality, the quality assurance engineer tests the functionality in a staging area to ensure that the software works as specified, followed by acceptance tests by the end-user. Once the functionality is accepted by the end user, QA team will also develop automated integration testing scripts to make sure that the functionality is automatically tested for all future builds and releases of the application. We aim to ensure close to 100% of test coverage during automated testing.

Reporting

Lynas Application Framework will support a uniform set of ‘list’ screens for each and every type of object. These list screens allow the user, based on role based security, to search for objects using pre-configured secure queries or search using ad-hoc queries with optional filters. Query results will be displayed as tabular reports on the screen. User can optionally export the data in CSV or PDF formats. 

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Depending on the user’s role, she can also select the object for viewing or editing the details of the object. The framework will also optionally support self-service charts and graphs to graphically display data being reported.

Third party business intelligence tools like SQL Server BI, QlikView or Tableau can be optionally connected to the framework’s REST APIs or the SQL data store for dynamic, advanced analytics.

Highly Scalable Applications

The Lynas Framework was designed to support mission critical enterprise applications deployed across large networks. The Lynas Framerwork is particularly suitable for use when building solutions to be deployed in the cloud, for example SaaS solutions, or an on premise server solution supports large numbers of users spread over a wide geographic area.

Built in features, such as the stateless application server, enable highly efficient scale out while also enabling infrastructure solutions to better defend against Denial of Service attacks, server hacking and other threats. The stateless server architecture ensures that a server under threat can be shut down, with load automatically transferred, without impacting the operation of the software solution.

Other key benefits:

·       SOA / Microservice capable

·       Horizontal scale-out

·       On-demand or automatic scale-out in public cloud

·       Multiple SQL Database options: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, SQLite,…

·       Multiple NoSQL / BigData options: DynamoDB, Cassandra, MongoDB,…

·       Support for big data analytics

·       Integraton ready to Hardoop and other technologies used in developing AI solutions.

Disaster Recovery

Software applications built using Lynas Application Framework allow us to design disaster recovery plans to recover from any type of data or system disaster. Examples of the potential recovery options are listed below. Details of the disaster recovery plan and processes can be designed along with the operational planning for the new application.

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·       Ability to support the application servers on any operating system on any public cloud or on-premise datacenters allow us to replicate the application servers across many geographies and prevent downtime due to natural disasters or network failures

·       Support for secure, automated, unattended deployment scripts and virtualized application servers (containers) can help us spin up new server instances in case or power, hardware or software failures

·       Automated backup of the centralized database and server files for easy restoration of services in case of accidents or malicious acts

·       Secure, cloud based configuration management and issue tracking systems to make sure that any source change, design change and issue status change is tracked reliably and any release of the application can be reproduced from the baseline by authorized personnel