When you first see Finsemble, you see the toolbar stretching across the top of the screen. It’d be easy to equate the toolbar with Finsemble. After all, what you see is what you get…right? But the toolbar is just the tip of the Finsemble iceberg.
Referencing the image, the iceberg represents Finsemble and above the surface of the water are the Finsemble components.
Components are apps that connect to Finsemble, are launched by Finsemble, and benefit from Finsemble’s microservices. Any app can become a component; they can be developed by ChartIQ, in-house, or by third-party vendors.
In software development, design principles separate the business logic (the structural element) and the presentation logic (the visual element) of content. This principle can be used to think about Finsemble as well.
Presentation Components
The toolbar, as well as the menus, buttons, and dialogs, are all what ChartIQ call’s presentation components.
All of the presentation components are just HTML5 windows styled to serve a common UI role. The toolbar, for instance, is just a long, thin HTML5 window that’s programmed to sit at the top of each end user’s screen to serve as a central hub for the user experience.
The presentation components exist to provide a fully realized desktop experience, framing in the business components that end users really care about.
Business Components
What are these business components that end users care about?
They’re the charts, the chats, the CRMs and all the other stuff that end users interact with throughout the day. Each business component sits inside a window—a Chromium container running a short operating layer stack. Windows and components have a one-to-one relationship—a Finsemble component always sits in a container window.
Each business component is automatically supplied with a Finsemble “header”—a customizable and interactive control that replaces the standard Microsoft Windows title bar, giving Finsemble applications a uniform look across all components.
Finsemble is all about putting your content front and center, and one of its primary jobs is to support the end user’s workflows with your choice of components, whatever they may be. But this is just the view of Finsemble above the waterline. Underneath the surface of the water is the rest of the iceberg: the foundation—a complex underpinning of infrastructure that delivers and displays content, provides communication pathways, and gives users control over their workspace.
In Part 2, join us as we dive deeper into the The What, Why, and How of the Finsemble Platform:
The Anatomy of Finsemble Part 2 – The What, The Why, And The How
