openSEAL: Welcome

Welcome to the home page for the open Standard Enterprise Application Library, also known as openSEAL.

What is openSEAL?

openSEAL is an open source project that provides a standard collection of libraries, frameworks, and containers that boost productivity and encourage standardization in larger enterprise developments. It is implemented in C# using the Microsoft .NET framework development platform. The openSEAL project is free for download and use by anyone who is interested in the project. The contents of the project are licensed by the Entessa Public License, Version 1.0 and anyone choosing to use any part of the library must comply with this license.

Whats New?

11/09/04 This release contains a large list of improvements. Within the business tier, we added container, interfaces and implementation for the event driven architecture (EDA) features of openSEAL. This is a very powerful enhancement that allows you to easily publish, broadcast, and listen for syncronous and asyncronous events within openSEAL. We also added to the container package a new exception IllegalConfigSetupException which is now used in the scheduler container. We also added fixes to the startup and shutdown methods of BaseBusinessApplicationService. Also, there is a new package org.openseal.component.config that has 2 new classes that allow for the parsing of a generic components XML config file structure. We overloaded the ToString() method on all the N*Types so that they return the ToString() of their inner type. There were settings added to the Job Sceduler to allow concurrency configuration of jobs.

5/10/04 Collectively, Releases 0.4.0.25 and 0.3.1.23 have a bunch of enhancements to make it easier and cleaner to do things. For instance, you can now create and deploy a Window Service without having to write any additional code, Instead defined you service in a config file and let openSEAL do the rest. For a complete list see the release notes.

7/5/03 Release 0.2.0 contains a cleanup of the reference applications UI, additions to user manunal. We've also made some minor tweaks to source code and comments.

6/16/03 general update to the content of this site. Can't say any of it is earth shattering, but there is some additional information in the User Manual!

6/11/03 openSEAL went live at the begining of June, so it is all new! However, openSEAL is the accumulation of many years of experience developing enterprise web based applications so it is not quite the young pup you might think. We encourage you to download a version, and read both the API documentation and the User Manual to get up and running with openSEAL. It is important to us that you get the maximum value out of openSEAL, so please let us know how we can help you via the Support channels.

openSEAL - it may be shiny and new but it's still old school!

Other open source projects we utilize

We encourage the use of the following open source projects in order to complement and get the most out of openSEAL.

  • Log4net - a port of the popular and powerful Apache Log4J, writtien by Nicko Cadell and Niall Daley. We love it.
  • NUnit - a cool version of the xUnit framework with some nice .NET specific touches, such as its use of attributes. Available under the zlib/libpng License and developed by James Newkirk, Philip Craig and contributors.
  • Nant - this is .NET version of an Ant like build tool developed by Gerry Shaw, Ian MacLean, Scott Hernandez and others. While it is not as mature as Ant, it is very useful. Under the GPL.

In addition, we used and customized the stylesheets and markup library provided by the small open source project Style, from Daniel Rall and Todd Fahrner. Saved us hours playing with CSS, so much thanks to them.