The Reporting and Forecasting Tool (RAFT) shows Institute Fiscal Officers what has been charged to their Cost Objects and forecasts changes to those charges based on changes in their base budget. This web application uses three different programming languages and strategies on each of its three tiers (presentation or web layer, service layer, and database layer) to give Fiscal Officers the information they need to control a DLC's budget.
The presentation tier, where users see and manipulate costs, shows data in the HTML markup language (view) driven by a custom JavaScript codebase (controller). The RAFT presentation tier uses a popular JavaScript framework, jQuery, to abstract browser-specific coding issues and make it easier for other developers to maintain the code. RAFT uses AJAX to retrieve all data from the service layer, and it maintains all user state (what data the user has chosen to view and manipulate) in the browser. This makes the application perform more like a desktop application, in that it does not need to make repeated calls to the database to save and retrieve the user state. Please see this whitepaper <TBD> for a more indepth explanation of RAFT presentation tier code.