ShadowSuite’s presentation layer or User Interface (UI) is a Rich Graphical interface developed for the Windows Desktop environment in Visual Basic. To enhance the user experience, Shadow has incorporated many of the standard Windows features, such as the repositioning of windows, “cut and paste,” on-screen sorting, and transfer of data to Excel. Shadow Financial Services is currently in the process of developing a complementary “Thin Client” UI utilizing .NET technology.

The Middle-Tier, where our business logic resides, is a number of sub-systems that represent logical divisions of business rules within the application to service different needs. Each sub-system consists of a number of service objects and data objects that represent the processes and data required to support the sub-system’s functionality.
All of the business logic has been developed in Visual C++ and is based on Microsoft’s COM Component Services. Shadow Financial Services has documented the interfaces to the business logic and provides it to licensed users for their own development efforts.

The Data Layer consists of those elements of the architecture that are designed to communicate with the relational database management system in a vendor-neutral manner. This communication is handled through Microsoft’s ADO services. The architecture’s support for the Data Layer is designed to allow the data objects to
perform a number of standard database SQL commands without being governed by
the idiosyncrasies of a particular database vendors rules and isolates all SQL from the business logic. ShadowSuite does not utilize and database triggers or stored procedures.