Design patterns in enterprise application integration for e-learning arena

Abstract

Pattern based design is an effective way to avoid an expensive process of reinventing, rediscovering and revalidating agnostic software artifacts. The Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) leverages the reusability factor of an application by applying decoupling and location transparency in the communication of the disparate applications and services. Design patterns are reusable solutions to solve recurring issues pertaining to the Functional, Non-Functional and Implementation tasks. The e-Learning is an ever growing and expanding arena. It has huge number of disparate applications and services that can be exposed over a ubiquitous media, such as the Internet, to the various kinds of end users. Therefore, the EAI is an important aspect in the e-Learning Arena in order to increase the high reusability and application decoupling factors. In this paper, we are imitating the ModelView-Controller (MVC) design patterns in order to explore the other composite patterns for an efficient integration of the applications and services. The demarcation of a Functional (View) and an Implementation (Model) task can be achieved deliberately by inducing an Integrator (Controller). The Controller can be further enriched to encapsulate certain Non-Functional activities such as security, reliability, scalability, and routing of request. This enables the separation of an Integration Logic from that of a Functional Logic (Client Application) and an Implementation Logic (Service). The Controller can be viewed by using the compound design pattern of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This paper discusses how the Dependency Injection pattern is used in the ESB pattern for the integration of the e-Learning applications.