Application Engine is two things:

• Development environment
• Runtime environment

It’s a development tool integrated with Application Designer. It’s a runtime environment driven from structured programs.

It was introduced as an alternative to Cobol in Release 5.  It moved from a separate application to part of Application Designer in version 8. In version 8, it supported restart, parallel processing and PeopleCode integration. Also included were full internet integration and improved MetaSQL.

Application Engine can be fairly handy in a PeopleSoft developer’s tool chest.

Aside from all of the useful batch processing things that it can do, it can also be useful for providing ways of running PeopleCode against a system directly from within Application Designer.

This can be used for things like testing some PeopleCode or providing some developer productivity utilities.