Enterprise Frameworks

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Enterprise Frameworks
David Hamu Dr. Mohamed Fayad
OOPSLA 99
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Background

• Software engineers have been developing
  frameworks for years.
• Motorola ISAC system framework implementation
  reduced code by 800K lines (66)
• The increased use of OO in enterprise settings
  has yielded a class of systems we call
  Object-Oriented Enterprise Frameworks

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Drivers

• The increase in complexity and risk of enterprise
  systems is related to two factors
• Velocity of business.
• Increased heterogeneity of systems architectures

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Drivers

• Velocity of business.
• Demand highly personalized products and services
• Increasingly competitive marketplace
• Differentiation is the key to success
• Products and services tailored to the individual
  customer ensure competitive advantage.
• Highly specialized software solutions are
  required to support a highly customer-tailored
  business model (Baumer, Gryczan, Knoll,
  Lilienthal, Riehle Zullighoven, 1997).

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Drivers

• Increased heterogeneity of systems architectures.
  
• Hardware and software systems are increasingly
  complex.
• Rapid changes in technology
• Acquisitions and mergers.

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Drivers
The acceleration cycle

• The speed at which businesses reinvent themselves
• Unprecedented demand for integrated enterprise
  systems

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Drivers

• Strong investment in information technology
  especially internet technologies
• Need to model rapid changes in business policies

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OOEF Perspectives

• Custom frameworks developed to support the
  operations of a significant functional component
  of the enterprise.
• Commercial frameworks developed to address a
  profitable market niche.
• Web-based frameworks to service and support
  client needs, including on-line purchasing,
  product support and other e-services.
• Application Service Providers (ASPs)

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OOEFs are

• More costly to build than traditional software
  products
• Less costly over the system lifecycle
• Costs are amortized across a market
• Generally bought, not built

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OOEF Metaphors

• Business Operating System
• Enterprise Intelligence
• Intuitive - User Friendly
• Evolving
• Modeling, not Programming

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OOEF Characteristics

• Mature Run-Time Functionality
• A good framework requires relatively little code
  to meet the user requirements for new enterprise
  applications.
• Framework builders or providers must have a clear
  understanding of the application domain in which
  the framework will be applied, and the design
  and implementation of the framework must reflect
  that understanding.

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OOEF Characteristics

• Support for extensibility and tailorability
• Software is frequently extended in ways its
  developers have not anticipated RUMB91.
• Support for common object-oriented constructs
• polymorphism
• Inheritance
• Encapsulation
• Reuse
• Persistence

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OOEF Characeristics

• A Catalog of Business Objects
• Templates for constructing new business objects
  based on specified operating scenarios.

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OOEF Characteristics

• Enduring Business Themes (EBTs)
• The structure for the sentences which are found
  in the language of business, the business objects
  are instantiations of EBTs.
• EBTs fill in the blanks, attributes or semantics
  in these sentence structures
• What is being done, not how it is being done,
  I.e. The Customers Point of View

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OOEF Characteristics

• Enduring Business Themes and Business Objects
• The purpose of the business
• Business objects are instantiations detailing how
  the business is run at a discrete point in time.
  
• A good enterprise framework reflects
• a concise understanding of the business through
  EBTs
• plus discrete instantiations of business objects
  reflecting the best practices known today

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OOEF Characteristics

• A Workflow Management Metaphor and Enduring
  Business Processes
• Workflow management
• streamlines the complex interactions between
  objects which are found in large-scale
  object-oriented applications.
• Proponents suggest workflow mechanisms can
  eliminate the need for most application
  programming in the workplace PRINS96.

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OOEF Characteristics

• A Workflow Management Metaphor and Enduring
  Business Processes
• Modern workflow management tools provide a
  graphical design palate for workflow definition.
• Nested state diagrams are well suited for the
  task of dynamic modeling of application workflows
  RUMB91.

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OOEF Characteristics

• A model for distributed objects
• Object Request Brokering
• Distributed Message Passing
• Remote Procedure Calls / Remote Method Invocation
• Must support transparent communication between
  objects over a distributed computing environment.

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OOEF Characteristics

• A model for distributed objects
• Enhances scalability
• as more users (clients) are added to the system,
  additional server instances can be added to
  improve throughput.
• Allows object definitions or structure to be
  preserved across the transport
• eliminating the need for the numerous data
  translation layers found in legacy systems.

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OOEF Characteristics

• Framework Adequacy
• Descriptive adequacy - Tools to visualize and
  monitor objects in the framework.
• Logical adequacy - Tools to model components
  behavior, roles and responsibilities.
• Synthesis adequacy - Integrated tools to
  facilitate problem resolution, thereby enhancing
  maintainability.
• Analysis adequacy - Integrated validation and
  verification tools.

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OOEF Characteristics

• Framework Adequacy
• Blueprint adequacy - Modeling tools for system
  specification, plus integrated configuration
  management and version control
• Epistemological adequacy - Tools for representing
  objects in the real world.
• Notational adequacy - Presentation constructs.
• Procedural adequacy - Recognition and search
  capabilities.

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OOEF Characteristics

• Framework Adequacy
• Contractual adequacy - Client or user-friendly
  tools for representing system behavior
  validation and regression testing
• Scaleable adequacy - Tools supporting
  tailorability, partitioning, composition,
  security/access and control.
• Administrative adequacy - Tools for modeling and
  managing the administration of the delivered
  product including install set builders, start
  and stop scripts, database management, etc.

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OOEF Characteristics

• Platform Independence/Portability
• Mature Framework Documentation

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Integration Problems

• Hollywood Principle
• When two or more frameworks call the application
  code and each framework assumes ownership of the
  main event loop of the application.
• Capitalization Principle
• Problems such as typing conflicts which result
  when integrating multiple frameworks and legacy
  systems.
• Overlapping Principle
• When two or more frameworks have the same
  real-world components with different
  representations and services.

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Integration Problems

• Composition Principle
• When a real-world component has to be modeled by
  integrating parts of functionality from different
  frameworks.
• Gap Principle
• When integrating two or more frameworks and the
  resulting architecture does not cover the desired
  applications requirements.
• Impedance Principle
• When two or more integrated frameworks with
  different architectures fail to interoperate.

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Bottom Line

• What are the Benefits?
• Budgetary Advantages
• Market Advantages
• Technical Advantages
• Managerial Advantages
• Economic Impact

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Bottom Line

• Budgetary Advantages
• Enforced standards reduced cost.
• Accelerated delivery of new application content.
• Improved delineation between infrastructure costs
  and departmental projects which should be funded
  outside of the information systems budget.

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Bottom Line

• Market Advantages
• The flexible information infrastructure of
  frameworks provide an improved linkage to a
  firms competitive strategy.
• Support for more rapid application deployment
  can reduce time to market for new products, and
  result in faster response to a customer's needs.

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Bottom Line

• Technical Advantages
• System release cycles are negotiated with the
  framework vendor.
• Experience suggests fewer resources required for
  maintenance and upgrades.
• Enforced reuse - with experience, solutions which
  compromise the object-oriented nature of the
  framework are discarded for approaches which
  increasingly leverage the reuse.

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Bottom Line

• Technical Advantages
• Built-in tools for system administration
  (startup, shutdown, fail-over, recovery, and
  archival), business process modeling, information
  modeling and application extensibility.
• Built-in knowledge of the application domain. The
  business analysis has been completed in part or
  in total when the framework is delivered.
• Comprehensive training.
• Framework documentation - high quality and
  delivered with the framework.

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Bottom Line

• Managerial Advantages
• Improved management discipline - Framework
  projects must be planned exhaustively.
• Project plans and budgets are more readily
  derived from the framework vendor and from other
  framework users.

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Bottom Line

• Economic Impact
• An increasingly large number of services and
  products related to OOEFs, such as consulting,
  research, books, training, search services, legal
  services, tools, etc.
• Specialization implies significantly higher
  revenues for those technology and service firms
  employing OOEFs.
• OOEFs are paying off today and the commercial
  price of an OOEF is comparable to legacy products.

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Bottom Line

• Economic Impact
• Hourly and capital costs may be higher, but
  lengthy implementation schedules are compressed
  from years to months and months to weeks.
• The E-Commerce enabler enterprises must work
  through on-line transactions over either
  identical or disparate frameworks.

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OOEFs are...

• Domain specific
• Distributed systems
• Commercially available today
• IBM San Francisco Project
• FASTechs FACTORYworks
• Camstars InSite
• Subscription Computing - MicronPC.com

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Summary

• Frameworks are a Proven Idea
• OOEFs are Commercially Available
• The Business Operating System
• OOEFs Have Specific Characteristics
• OOEFs Contribute Bottom Line Advantages
• An important area for research