Application Engine

Application Engine is a PeopleTool designed to develop background SQL processing programs. AE offers an alternative to writing Cobol or SQR programs for background SQL processing. AE does not generate, parse or understand SQL. It merely executes SQL that we provide.

Using the Application Engine, we create application that performs background SQL processing against the Data. AE is used for batch processing where we have large amount of data that needs to be processed without user intervention.

We can use AE for straight, row-by-row processing, but the most AE programs are written to perform set-based processing.

Application Engines execution component is written in C++ and is part of and maintained by – PeopleTools. This executable program is called PSAE.exe.

Application Engine Advantages

 

• Graphical Developer Interface

• Encapsulation

• Data Dictionary Interface

• Enhanced SQL/Meta-SQL Support

• Effective-Dating

• Platform Flexibility

• Reuse Business Logic

• Upgrade Support

• Built-in Restart Logic

Graphical Developer Interface: with PeopleSoft 8, AE is fully integrated with People Tools. This means that we can use the Application Designer, an intuitive graphical interface to create Application Engine Programs.

Encapsulation: An AE program resides completely within the DB. With Application Engine, we do not have to compiler our programs, there are no statements to store, and there is no need to directly interact with the operating environment we use.

Data Dictionary Integration: one of the cornerstones of PeopleSoft functionality is the Application Designer. Because of the way it works, most field attributes, such as type, length and scale, only need to be specified once, and that change will be reflected globally. If the same field appears on more than one record, we know that the same attributes reside in each record definition. 

Because AE works in harmony within the PeopleSoft system and references the Data Dictionary for object definitions, changes to meta-data in the database have no impact on AE programs.

Enhanced SQL/Meta-SQL support: we can write SQL within AE, or we can copy SQL statements into AE from any SQL utility with few, if any changes.

RDBMS platforms have many differing syntax rules-especially in regard to Date, time and other numeric calculations. For the most part, we can work around this problem using PeopleSoft meta-SQL, which AE supports. This language is designed to replace RDBMS-specific SQL syntax with a standard syntax.