The Base One Foundation Component Library (BFC) is a rapid application development toolkit for secure building, fault-tolerant, database applications on Windows and ASP.NET. In conjunction with Microsoft’s Visual Studio, BFC provides a general-purpose web application framework for working with databases from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sybase, and MySQL, running under Windows or Unix / Linux. BFC also includes facilities for distributed computing, batch processing, queuing, and database command scripting.
BFC is based on a database-centric architecture whose cross-DBMS data dictionary plays a central role in supporting data security, validation, optimization, and maintainability features. Base One holds a number of US patents on its core technologies, with additional patents pending. Developers can incorporate BFC components into Windows applications written in any of the major Microsoft programming languages (Visual C ++, C #, VB.NET, ASP.NET) and using a variety of technologies, including COM / ActiveX, MFC, Crystal Reports, and AJAX . BFC works with both managed and unmanaged code, and it can be used to build or thin client or rich client applications, with or without browser-based interfaces.
The development of BFC was originally funded by Marsh & McLennan and Deutsche Bank in the mid-1990s. The securities custody system built by Deutsche Bank with BFC is one of the earliest successful examples of commercial grid computing. The name “BFC” was a play on Microsoft’s MFC, which (starting with Visual C ++ 1.5) BFC extended through class libraries to facilitate the development of large-scale, client / server database applications. With the release of Visual C ++ 2.0, BFC provided a way to upgrade from 16-bit Windows 3.1 and Windows NT to true 32-bit Windows MFC applications. Under Visual C ++ 4.0, BFC added Base One’s Internet Server, enabling transparent database access across the Internet for distributed rich client and grid computing applications. Starting with Visual C ++ 6.0, BFC added COM support, so that VB and ASP programmers could use BFC’s database components, including ActiveX grid (table), combo, and edit controls. With the advent of VisualStudio .NET 2002, BFC was extended to support the .NET languages, C #, VB.NET, and ASP.NET.