An Architecture for Internet Business Applications with Business Components

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An Internet business application is a business application that runs on every node of the Internet and accesses a central database. Complemented by a short overview on support technologies and tools like database access with Java JDBC and object distribution middleware like Java RMI, this chapter presents different architectures for Internet business applications. It shows disadvantages and pitfalls of well-known and widely used architectures, namely of the “clicked-together” one-layer two-tier architecture, and of the three-layer architecture. Instead, it proposes that business procedures being run on client nodes access shared business entities located on the company server node with a central database. This is accomplished by using a five-layer architecture with the business process (domain) layer on top of the presentation layer, and this one on top of the business entity (domain) layer. The persistence layer below is separated into an access layer and a storage layer. To increase the reusability, closely related objects on each layer are horizontally integrated and provided in the form of components. Since different aspects of a business entity and a business process are found on four of the five layers, business entity components and business process components are introduced as organisational units for delivery and maintenance that integrate vertically the constituent components on the different layers. The proposed application architecture is based on the collaboration of business entity components and business process components.