This article was first published on Geoprise Recent News.
LONDON, March 1, 2025 - Geoprise, maker of the GM-X Application Suite, is proud to announce that Corporate LiveWire, a platform which informs business professionals and individuals in the corporate sector around the globe, has awarded its Software Design Service of the Year in the Corporate LiveWire Global Awards to Geoprise R&D Director Tony Marston for the second year in a row.
These accolades build upon the Best Open-Source Rapid Application Development award which Tony received in September 2024 from Innovation in Business, The Developer Awards 2024.
The GM-X Application Suite is an Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) application that was designed from the ground up as a Web application deployable on public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid infrastructure, or on premises. It comprises 21 integrated subsystems, each with its own database and transactions. This allows customers to economize by paying only for the subsystems they require.
At the heart of the GM-X Application Suite is an award-winning open source framework called RADICORE which was designed and built by Tony Marston as an Internet application using the PHP language. First released in 2006, RADICORE is supported and published by Radicore Software Limited, a British company founded by Tony Marston in 2005 which joined forces with Geoprise in 2014 to build and market GM-X.
RADICORE is not a clone of any other framework, nor does it use any third-party framework components. Other than including various proven and popular open-source libraries for utility purposes (such as generating PDF documents, emailing, and generating or processing spreadsheets), it is totally 100% unique. Building upon his decades of experience with earlier frameworks and programming languages, Tony specifically engineered RADICORE with Rapid Application Development (RAD) - low-code methods and no-code tools that allow development cycle times to be measured with a stopwatch instead of a calendar - in mind. His award-winning approach abstracts all the functionality which is independent of any application so that it runs a Template Method Pattern as the base class software for any application without any modifications. RADICORE also has additional software components which provide a user interface comprising 45 different reusable Transaction Patterns - far more than basic Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations - each implementing its own structure (view), behavior (controller), and content (model).
Business transformation through RAD enables organizations to adapt quickly in response to rapidly evolving market needs, improve customer satisfaction, and gain a competitive edge by driving immediate and significant changes to operations and capabilities. RAD comprises methodologies and tools that enable the cycle time between idea and implementation (sometimes known as "Time to Market" or "TTM") to be substantially shorter compared to traditional methods. Because the expense of software development is directly proportional to the amount of time taken to design, develop, and test it, then shorter TTM equals lower cost.
RADICORE achieves this objective through its library of Transaction Patterns, automatic forms navigation, and dynamic generation and re-use of program code including PHP scripts, Web pages in hypertext markup language (HTML), and structured query language (SQL) statements. The RADICORE framework also supplies a Role Based Access Control (RBAC) subsystem which controls access to the entire application by means of a collection of dynamic menus, an Audit Logging subsystem, and an Activity Based Workflow subsystem. As well as being able to run all the application subsystems it also has a Data Dictionary subsystem which can generate the necessary components for new subsystems. These capabilities make it possible for software development and information technology operations (DevOps) productivity to rival or exceed that of the fastest artificial intelligence (AI) using large language models (LLM) without introducing any hallucination risks and the appurtenant need for productivity-eroding code reviews to mitigate hallucination risks.
The roots of RADICORE go back 20 years prior to its first release:
Although UNIFACE employs eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), it does not use them to create Web pages. Instead, it follows its legacy procedure which compiles static forms that run on desktop personal computers (PCs). Believing this approach to be unnecessarily complex, inflexible, and incompatible with modern principles of mobile-first adaptive Web application development, Tony introduced a major improvement in his first release of RADICORE which constructs all Web pages as HTML documents on the fly using a series of XSL stylesheets. This requires just one software component to convert the application data into XML, then transform it into HTML using an XSL stylesheet. Instead of requiring separate stylesheets to deal with the different columns on each database table, the RADICORE framework uses just 12 reusable stylesheets which can handle the columns from any database table.
Because building each component in a subsystem follows exactly the same steps, the RADICORE framework automates this procedure through its Data Dictionary subsystem. This follows the UNIFACE Application Model but reverses the procedure by first building the database so that table's structure can be quickly imported into the Dictionary, then exported into a PHP script which is then loaded into that table's object when it is instantiated. This means that after creating a database table, the scripts to maintain the contents of that table can be generated without having to write any program code whatsoever - no PHP, no HTML and no SQL. While the generated code provides all the basic processing to move data from the user interface (UI) to the database and back again, the only thing left for the developer to do is to update the relevant "hook" methods in each concrete table class to provide the custom business logic.
Geoprise Technologies Corporation was formed in 1999 by a group of software executives with over a century of previous cumulative experience building enterprise resources planning (ERP) and manufacturing operations management systems and implementing them worldwide. The privately held company's mission, then and now, is to create exceptional value for its customers by harnessing the power and economy of information technology to enable lean, world-class industrial operations on a global scale. Today, Geoprise focuses exclusively on delivering its state-of-the-art GM-X ERP solution, which it markets through Geoprise Technologies Licensing, a joint venture with Radicore Software Limited, to businesses operating in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Rim. Geoprise values integrity by maintaining strict independence, intense commitment to business ethics and profound respect for intellectual property rights. For further information, visit the company's Web site at geoprise.com.
Radicore Software Limited, established in 2005, markets and supports the open source RADICORE Rapid Application Development (RAD) Toolkit for building enterprise applications which are platform independent, browser independent and database independent. RADICORE is based on a combination of the 3 Tier Architecture and model-view-controller (MVC) Design Pattern and comes with pre-built and reusable components in the data access and presentation layers. The GM-X ERP application is built using the RADICORE framework. For further information, visit the company's Web site at radicore.org.