The development model for eQ!™ is centered on the delivery technology neutral business component and a declarative deployment approach. What is a technology delivery neutral business component? Simply put, it is a core business object that is independent of EJB, JSP, Swing, Webservices, and most frameworks such as Struts. By developing with this neutrality in mind, the component is free to be used in future technology advances and changes, and is reusable across applications within an enterprise.

Once your business components are designed and built, the rest of the foundation is configured for the services and environment of your choice. This means that you can configure how your datasource is used, if you want to use the script engine and where those scripts are located and how you define the relationships for the Collections feature are all configured via an XML file. This declarative approach is widely used in EJB, databases and other systems to be an easy way to change how your deployment is set up.

The idea is that you design and develop the business component with it's required business rules independent of anything else. When built upon the eQ!™ foundation, this neutral business object can then be delivered to the underlying technologies of your choice easily with the provided adapters. Since eQ!™ knows about the technology and about your business component, your component quickly becomes reusable without writing custom code to support the delivery technology of your choice. eQ!™ provides the adapters, you provide the business component, and your time to deployment is greatly lessened.

In addition to providing the adapters, eQ!™ also provides an XML-based script engine that allows business processes to be executed without requiring custom coding. This feature can help both the architects and the junior developers as it allows the architect to design and model the flow of the application, perhaps in UML as activity diagrams, and allow the junior developers to implement the flow using scripting. This allows the scripting to be changed as needed without recompiling, or changing any Java code.

The following diagram shows this model.