Patterns for e-business

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Level: Introductory

John Lord (jglord@us.ibm.com), Consulting IT Architect, IBM

01 Jun 2000

The paths to creating e-businesses are repeatable. Many companies assume that they are unique and that therefore very creation of an e-business has to be learned as you go. While this may be encouraged by some service providers and programmers (because it is both profitable and allows programming artistic flair), IBM has learned that in fact, there are lessons and architectural paths or patterns that can be discerned from all these engagements. Whether your company is a startup or has extensive legacy applications, these patterns allow you to reuse existing technologies so that your projects can be completed quickly.

A clear road map

One of the great values of object-oriented application development is the increase in the use of prebuilt, tested, well-understood components. The proponents of this style of building code promised (and delivered) a great deal of reusability in their code and thereby shortened the development time for applications, reduced time to market for new products, and lowered the cost for both new development and maintenance.

Kent Beck, one of the key OO code developers, told customer groups he worked with that they needed to develop a vocabulary to facilitate the design and building of applications. If people working together can recognize the tasks they need to accomplish in familiar terms and understand how the desired application is composed of well-known parts, the specification of the new project is clear and the path to build the application can be mapped out in a set of known steps. The use of patterns enables a development team to clearly articulate to both prospective users and management what they will be building.

The Patterns for e-business add a great deal to the body of published coding patterns in that IBM has documented a small number of patterns and several scenarios for each that give developers of e-business applications both a vocabulary to describe the problem to be solved (at an architectural, design, and end-to-end product level) and a great deal of information about how to solve the problem. These patterns are the distillation of the collected wisdom of IBM Global Services, Business Partners, and Customer IT Architects.

A particular feature of the Patterns for e-business is that each business pattern has several logical patterns, or topologies, which might be thought of as variations on the main theme of the pattern. These topologies give you a set of variations on how to fulfill a particular business need, based on the intent of the project and the starting point or existing infrastructure that must be incorporated into the final solution. For example, if the data you need currently resides in a corporate database controlled by an existing transaction manager, then you must plan how to access and use this data. The Patterns for e-business provide just such variations on the main pattern. This set of topologies provides the variations needed by developers building new systems for new companies or within existing companies, as well as for projects that seek to provide capabilities based on existing infrastructure and systems. For an example of a topology, see the user-to-business topologies on the Patterns for e-business site.

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A prescriptive approach

The Patterns for e-business also provide a prescriptive approach. Physicians are formally taught a process to evaluate a patient and arrive at a treatment plan. They do this by quickly assessing the major systems, then honing in on the system or systems with problems. The physician can then follow a standard decision tree logic pattern to arrive at a treatment plan. In the case of the Patterns for e-business, you can start with the customer's wants and needs, their business problems, existing business processes and rules, and any existing systems, data, or infrastructure. You can then follow a structured approach to arrive at a customized solution for the customer that addresses the business functions (such as Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Knowledge Management, Business Intelligence, customer or employee Collaboration, e-commerce, or many others as shown in Figure 1).

The Patterns for e-business Web site helps you to get to the information you need quickly. The site also helps you follow a logical progression (as shown above) to arrive at the information appropriate to solve your current business need. Each topology includes several implementations, so that you can review implementations based on Windows technology, distributed technology (such as AIX), or servers (such as OS/390 and OS/400). You could use the business and logical patterns structure to document your own physical patterns based on the products you prefer. Over time IBM will add more third-party product content to the site.

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Providing reuse

The patterns work is intended to provide the smallest number of Patterns for e-business that will let IT architects, in 80% of cases, analyze their business problem and reuse 50 to 80% of proven architecture, design, and product patterns and guidelines. If your project has less complex business problems, you may get higher levels of reuse and can probably address your requirements with a single pattern and topology. If your project is more complex, each pattern may provide less reuse, but you may also be able to use combinations of patterns. The Patterns for e-business enable you to quickly develop much of your required infrastructure by the reuse of proven:

• Architecture patterns
• Design patterns
• Runtime patterns
• Design, development, and deployment guidelines

The patterns are not designed to be a cookbook or to give you a complete guide to building applications. They are designed to give strong guidance to designers and to provide links to a large body of reference material and experience from other developers who have worked on the same problem.

The Patterns for e-business are designed so that you can put them together with existing applications. They can be used to plan what must be done to modify an existing application as well as to help modify an initial product to connect to other systems or to provide additional data or function. In other words, the patterns can be combined to solve complex problems. For example, if you were building a site that offered goods for sale and provided supply chain management and inventory checking, the solution could be a combination of User-to-Online Buying and Business-to-Business.

The Patterns for e-business topologies can also help describe how to construct systems that incorporate existing applications and infrastructure. One of the key points of the IBM Application Framework for e-business is that you can build on your existing infrastructure and systems to speed development. Shortening time to market but also reusing existing assets can greatly increase your likelihood for success, since the core of the new application is well understood and proven. So, you can add new function to existing systems while continuing to use them in the old way, providing a smooth transition. It's a good idea to serve customers or other businesses using the existing channel while bringing a new channel online and providing users and other businesses time to convert or adopt the new access and services.

The Patterns for e-business are equally usable for new businesses or new companies starting on the Web.

The pattern names reflect the generalized nature of each of the patterns. The business solution areas are only examples of the general type of application solution provided by the pattern. It should be clear that the patterns can be and often are combined to solve more complex business problems.

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Getting what you need

These patterns are developed by an IBM program that captures and documents the experiences of the teams building projects at customer sites and the teams within IBM that are responsible for the transformation of IBM to an e-business. There are many case studies of this work listed in the customer section of the IBM case study Web site (see Resources). Each pattern and collection of appropriate topologies are brought together through a structured description on the Patterns for e-business Web Site and draw upon an extensive resource that may include:

• Redbooks
• White papers
• Testing reports
• Guidelines
• Development kits

• Choosing the application topology
• Choosing a runtime topology
• Product mapping

• Redbooks
• White papers
• Testing reports
• Guidelines
• Development kits

• Choosing the application topology
• Choosing a runtime topology
• Product mapping

• Performance
• Technology options
• Application design
• Application development
• System management

The Redbooks dedicated to a specific pattern describe the pattern in detail and document standard topics for a given set of topologies within a pattern:

• Choosing the application topology
• Choosing a runtime topology
• Product mapping

• Performance
• Technology options
• Application design
• Application development
• System management

Each team also adds their work to the patterns Web page, which adds new breadth and depth to the selections you can make.

The Patterns for e-business are proving to be an extremely important asset to IBM and the IBM Partners in working with customers who are intent on either extending their existing business or for new startup companies in their efforts to become e-businesses.

Resources

• Visit the IBM case studies site.
  
  
• Check our references:
  • "EPISODES: A Pattern Language of Competitive Development" by Ward Cunningham, in Pattern Languages of Program Design edited by Norman Kerth, James Koplien, and John Vlissides (Addison Wesley)
  • Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides (Addison Wesley)
  • A Pattern Language by C. Alexander, S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, I. Fiksdahl-King, and S. Angel (Oxford University Press)
  • Pattern - Oriented Software Architecture: A System of Patterns by Frank Buschmann, Regine Meunier, Hans Rohnert, Perter Sommerlad, and Michael Stal (Wiley, John, & Sons)
  
  
• View a redbook that documents user-to-business patterns: Patterns for e-business: User to Business Patterns for Topology 1 and 2 using Web Sphere Advanced Edition .
  
  
• You might also check out a redbook that supports the Patterns for e-business and provides samples from the Patterns Development Kit: Servlet and JSP Programming with IBM WebSphere Studio and VisualAge for Java .
  
  
• If you're interested in using patterns for other types of work, try "Applying Patterns to JDBC Development", in Java Developer's Journal .
  
  
• Tour the Patterns for e-business Web site.
  

About the author

		John Lord is an Consulting Information Technology Architect with IBM and has been taking a lead role in application and product development projects for over 25 years. Currently he is the Innovative e-business Technology Marketing Manager. His primary interests are performance analysis, capacity planning and transition development. John is a frequent presenter at customer, user group, and technical conferences around the world. He helps customers understand how to bring the power of e-business to build a secure, trusted set of applications to improve their revenue, avoid costs, and improve customer services. His particular emphasis is on utilization of and security for existing application systems in an e-business environment. You can contact him at jglord@us.ibm.com.

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