The Ibm Application Framework for E-Business

The IBM Application Framework for e-business

As companies race to transform their businesses into e-businesses, they are discovering that the transformation process is not always straightforward. The IBM Application Framework for e-business (the Framework) is a means for achieving business transformation and a foundation framework for developing and extending e-business processes and applications. This paper describes the Framework, showing it is based on industry standards, including enterprise Java™ technologies, and focuses on enabling complete e-business solutions. It further describes how the system model and application-programming model of the Framework and the IBM products that contribute to the platform of the Framework combine to enable a cohesive, prescriptive approach to creating e-business solutions. The paper also shows that the Framework will evolve to support increasingly sophisticated e-business applications, and that IBM is dedicated to working closely with the industry to contribute new technologies to open standards.

An e-business connects critical business systems directly to customers, employees, suppliers, and distributors via the Web to improve time to market, access a broader base of customers and suppliers, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. To achieve these benefits, existing businesses must transform their traditional business processes with e-business applications. New businesses, sometimes called "NetGens," can adopt e-business applications from the beginning to achieve the same benefits. To allow e-businesses to reap the desired benefits, e-business applications must meet some fundamental requirements; they must be:

* Standards-based to ensure portability of e-business applications across multiple client and server platforms and improve flexibility and time to market

* Server-centric to allow e-business applications to be developed and deployed quickly, expand access to a broad range of client types, and offer improved management and deployment capabilities characteristic of modern e-business applications

* Scalable to allow e-business applications to handle the highly variable and unpredictable loads in today's Web environment

* Available to address the global nature of the Web requiring that e-business applications run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with guaranteed quality of service

* Secure to address customers', suppliers', and other constituents' demands for secure Web interactions, in recognition of the potential risks of doing business on the Web

* Easy to develop and deploy to achieve lower costs and faster time to market, both critical success factors for any business

* Manageable to achieve lower maintenance costs and contribute to higher availability

* Able to leverage and extend existing assets to improve time to market and reduce cost of development and deployment, while improving security, reliability, and scalability

Application frameworks1 are becoming increasingly important for developing complex applications, because these application frameworks help application designers deal with complexity by allowing the designers to "capture the essence of successful patterns, architecture, components, policies, services, and programming mechanisms."2 As a result, applications are "correct, portable, efficient, and inexpensive."3 An application framework describes a set of interacting components and services available to an application, describes the responsibilities of components and services, and describes the interactions between the components and services. A developer creates an application by composing and extending the components and services available in the application framework.

The IBM Application Framework for e-business4 (henceforth called the Framework) is a cross-IBM initiative providing a very powerful, comprehensive set of open standards, services, and products that address the requirements of e-business applications. The goal of the Framework is to enable businesses, large and small, to quickly and easily build and deploy a broad spectrum of robust, secure, scalable, manageable, interoperable, and portable e-business applications.

Application frameworks typically address specific business domains, such as manufacturing or finance. The intent of the Framework, however, is to address all of e-business and so span multiple business domains. Thus, the Framework may be considered a foundation application framework, with guidance for e-business application development at two levels: first, an application framework for e-business applications in general and, second, a set of application frameworks for domain-specific e-business applications.

To achieve the fundamental goal of a foundation application framework, the Framework defines:

* A system model that structures the fundamental topology of e-business applications for a broad spectrum of business domains

* An application programming model, based on the system model, for designing e-business applications, including an architecture that supports a broad spectrum of business domains, and architectures that support a number of business-specific domains

* A platform for developing, deploying, and managing e-business solutions for a number of business domains

The process of creating an e-business application with the Framework begins with the classification of the type of interaction necessary for the business domain. Within the Framework these classifications are called patterns for e-business. Each pattern suggests a set of application frameworks that can be used to create the application. Choosing an application framework involves decisions about the requirements listed above. The implementation uses the appropriate aspects of the general application framework.

This paper describes these aspects of the Framework, with a focus on technical aspects of the application programming model, showing how they contribute to meeting the requirements of e-business applications. The paper also briefly describes some of the ways in which the Framework is evolving under IBM's direction to keep pace with the rapidly evolving requirements for e-business. Finally, the paper discusses related work.

The Framework system model

The Framework defines a system model5 that supports the design of a broad range of Web-oriented e-business applications that meet all the requirements mentioned previously. The multitier standards-based e-business system model of the Framework (see Figure 1) contains