Introduction

What is Kinetic?

Kinetic Data provides an Enterprise Workflow Platform for building highly scalable and complex apps in record time. We combine the best of low-code and pro-code development to enable the world's top organizations to achieve their digital modernization goals.

Think of Kinetic as the plumbing: all of the common stuff that's needed to build an application at enterprise scale. Things like authentication, users and groups, data storage, security and permissions, error handling, integrations and user interfaces.

We also bring the environment. Our architecture is designed specifically for enterprise scale. Embedded in our stack are technologies like Cassandra, Docker, and Kubernetes which ensure that the platform can grow with an organization as usage is expanded.

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Kinetic solves the problems IT cares about and enables the business to concentrate on what provides real value.

How Kinetic Works

Kinetic believes in making both hardcore and citizen developers heroes within their organizations. Our approach is to provide a framework for your existing developers to build highly configurable, low-code widgets and integrations using open languages like JavaScript and Ruby.

Provided widgets and widgets you build in Kinetic are designed to be shared throughout the Platform with citizen developers who assemble these pieces into functional, scalable, and secure applications – enabling the people closest to the problem to provide a solution and improve it over time.

With Kinetic, you get the building blocks necessary to create business applications that are wicked fast, highly scalable, and secure. Over the course of our 20+ years, we've distilled the apps we've built down to these primary components:

Workflows

When you think about it, most business apps are just a big collection of workflows. A user logs in - something happens. A user submits a web form - something else happens. Some workflows can be simple, like sending an email notification. Others can be more complex, like fetching data from multiple systems, transforming it, evaluating some logic, and then performing an action based on the outcome.

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Kinetic Workflows provide a framework for creating flexible, automated business processes that can be improved over time by non-developers using our low-code drag-and-drop designer.

Each step within a workflow is provided a set of inputs that perform an action and return a predefined set of outputs that can be leveraged to make business decisions once complete. These steps are typically provided by Kinetic or are built and customized by your developers for use in the Platform.

Kinetic Workflows can perform more complex tasks that require things like looping, recursion, data manipulation, and string interpolation. You can also use express advanced business logic using the Ruby programming language, so there is virtually no limit to what logic you can perform.

Forms

Kinetic Forms are used to collect, validate, and store data from end users and workflows. You can even pull data from other systems and store it in Kinetic. Forms are the primary data storage mechanism in the Kinetic Platform.

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How are Kinetic Forms used?

• End users interact with a UI/UX interface to submit data into a workflow
• Workflows leverage data stored in tables/databases

Kinetic Forms are created and maintained using our low-code drag-and-drop designer which allows admins to configure fields that define the type of data being collected (text boxes, drop-down lists, dates, and so on) as well as other metadata like whether a field is required or visible.

Like all Kinetic components, Forms can be extended using custom Javascript, CSS, and HTML to enhance the look and feel, or to write custom validations to ensure clean data is being captured.

Portals

Portals are what the end user experiences when interacting with a Kinetic-built app. Portals are built using ReactJS and can be fully customized to meet your project's exact needs. Developers have full control over theming and branding, navigation and layout.

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Portals leverage the Kinetic Platform's APIs to gather data and draw it up in the end user's browser.

For example, many times a portal is a collection of forms that can be submitted by end users. In that case, the portal would query Kinetic's Forms API to retrieve a list of forms and present them to the user. Eventually the user navigates to a Form (built using our Form Builder), which gets rendered inside the portal.

In other cases, a portal may be displaying a list of records (we call these submissions) that need to be filled out by the user. Imagine a list of tasks that need to be completed. In this case, the portal would query the Kinetic Platform's Submissions API to retrieve a list of relevant submissions and present them to the user in a table.

Integrations

Integrations are critical to the success of introducing low-code platforms that enable digital modernization in large organizations. No app exists on an island; they need to work with the larger ecosystem, especially when you start getting major adoption.

All integration plugins are built to a standard specification which defines a set of inputs, outputs and connection information. These plugins are built using code so that they can be battle tested and distributed throughout the Platform confidently.

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Can Kinetic integrate with my [fill-in-the-blank] system?

If the system you want to connect with is accessible by network either directly or via the Kinetic Agent, the Kinetic Platform can integrate with it. Period.

Plugin code can be customized to import libraries and SDKs, making them able to work with just about any system. Plugins can be built to use any protocol imaginable, such as REST, SOAP, SNMP, RPC, and more. You can also call directly to databases with proprietary languages using imported Java libraries. Oh, and if that's not enough, you can call a command line to reach into other systems too.

Once built, integrations get packaged up, tested, and imported into the Platform. After connection information is configured, integrations can be used in a low-code fashion by non-developers in Kinetic's Form and Workflow designers.