Strategic XML

System Design

Several important design decisions need to be made that will affect the overall architecture of the system. Three primary questions need to be answered:

• What technology will we use to store and forward orders to the central system?

• What language and/or design tool will we use to build the client application?

• What language or technology will we use to implement the order processing service?

Store-and-Forward Technology

There are several possible answers to the first system-design question, but time and budget constraints dictate that a custom developed solution is impractical. Although several commercial message queuing technologies are available, one of the oldest and most reliable messaging platforms is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ...