The U.S. has rightly been long renowned for its manufacturing expertise, starting even before Eli Whitney, with the greatest demonstration of productive know-how as an "arsenal of democracy" during WWII. The development of assembly line techniques and interchangeable parts was done long before Henry Ford, and from the early 19th century were marveled at and acclaimed the world over as the "American Method". Even today, sooner or later someone has to make a thing. Strangely, here at the start of the 21st century, software is all too often being made like shoes were in the Middle Ages: Laboriously by hand, one at a time, no two alike, horribly expensive, and always the wrong size. If that weren't bad enough, if the final software development costs are those of a Paiget, then what's eventually delivered is a Swatch. The pressures of shortening time-to-market usually leads to greater demands on a perceived tight technical labor market, the belief being something like more smart bodies are better. This helps the head hunters and the human resource gatekeepers, but only exasperates the problem, as those who've been sent to dot.gone.halla can attest to. Good news, the solution is readily at hand, and has been for quite some time: Use pre-built and configurable components; group them like Legos to exploit their time-proven characteristics in building more complex elements; keep at it until the application is done; then start to continually improve the product using the same procedure. We've actually been doing this from the beginning, while some of our larger competitors have been touting this of late (e.g., BrickHouse, Xuma). We use the FrameWork III internally to develop our own products (something about eating dog food), on average one a month; our challenges now are ones of marketing and promotion instead of technology itself. Among other things, FrameWork III allows us to successfully complete the fixed-price, committed-date turn-key projects in which we specialize. We offer FrameWork III to companies wanting to develop their own software in-house, covered by a fairly generous Development License Agreement. How good is it? Glad you asked. Similar to Mark Miller's Challenge (President of Eagle Software), we will give US$25,000.00 if we cannot produce an operable application prototype within six hours, at the customer's facility, using the customer's database. We have a one-page agreement outlining the terms and conditions of this challenge, simple and direct (in sharp contrast to, say, Oracle's US$1M challenge, which has more holes than Florida ballots). We haven't lost a 25K chunk yet, but we have made sales on the spot after a demonstration. FrameWork III is directly scaleable, from a stand-alone desktop installation, to group, department and enterprise scope using an application server(s). The distributed nature is client-server, for local, intranet and internet topologies; it even supports direct socket connections for those who want to exploit the railroad-track aspects of the internet and avoid the problems and limitations of standard browsers. (It is absolutely amazing that many of those who couldn't get "regular" client-server to work have jumped on the web bandwagon, thinking it's something different.) This color-coded block diagram outlines the architecture and structure of FrameWork III, and makes reference to some elements in the FutureWare Software Library, a storehouse that inventories objects, templates and repositories (think Legos here). Click on a block of interest to get more information; move the cursor out of the block area to close the pop-up. Please note that some browsers cannot handle dependent windows.