Patterns: Implementing Self-Service in an SOA Environment

140 Patterns: Implementing Self-Service in an SOA Environment

7.1 e-business application design considerations

The following list provides key issues to consider when designing e-business

applications:

򐂰 The user experience and the look and feel of the site need to be constantly

enhanced to leverage emerging technologies and to attract and retain site

users.

򐂰 New features have to be constantly added to the site to meet customer

demands.

򐂰 Such changes and enhancements will have to be delivered at record speed to

avoid losing customers to the competition.

򐂰 e-business applications in essence represent the corporate brand online.

Developers have to work closely with the marketing department to ensure

that the digital brand effectively represents the company image. Such

intra-group interactions usually present content management challenges.

򐂰 It is hard to predict the runtime load of e-business applications. Based on the

marketing of the site, the load can increase dramatically over time. If the load

increases, the design must allow such applications to be deployed in various

high-volume configurations. It is important to be able to move Web

applications between these runtime configurations without making significant

changes to the code.

򐂰 Security requirements are significantly higher for e-business applications

compared to traditional applications. To execute traditional applications from

the Web, a special set of security-related software might be needed to access

private networks.

򐂰 The emergence of the personal digital assistant (PDA) and broadband

Internet markets will require the same information to be presented in various

UI formats. PDAs will require a lightweight presentation style to accommodate

the low network bandwidth. Broadband users, on the other hand, will demand

a highly interactive, rich, GUI.

To meet these challenges, it is critical to design Web applications to be flexible.

This chapter helps you understand some of these design challenges and

presents various design patterns that promote loosely coupled design to provide

a maximum degree of flexibility in a Web application. We also provide application

integration design guidelines and best practices for Web services, J2EE

Connectors, and JMS.