Technology Adoption for a Leading Software Company

An Enterprise Solutions company in logistics and supply-chain management marketplace needed assistance in differentiating from their competitors in terms of J2EE technology usage to project its technological/architectural advantages. A comprehensive analysis of the current architecture, product roadmap, and technology trends was needed to evolve the technology adoption plan.

Design Review and Proposal
Engineers from Middleware Works Technology group conducted an in-depth product review, and came out with a set of design recommendations and technology adoption roadmap.
The product was reviewed for overall architecture (frameworks to be used/built, important modules and designs, services/integration, and considerations for large scale deployments and rapid integration), sustainability of current technology as per the product roadmap, current usage of J2EE, and technology and trends (J2EE, SOA, Web 2.0).
The analysis identified strengths and inadequacies in the current design. Based on the requirements, the relevant technology and infrastructure options were proposed and discussed, including SOA Options in J2EE, BPEL adoption, portal products, and approaches for adopting Web 2.0 and AJAX into application architecture. Customizability, scalability, and enterprise integration/SOA were identified as key requirements going forward. A comparison of the companyżs technology with its competing products in the market was also taken up.

Key Findings
The application had a performance advantage in the sense that it leveraged J2EE application server scalability strengths, and had declarative infrastructure capabilities as security and transactions. It also had low resource requirements as it has a central application server and DB that need minimal bandwidth with remote connectivity that work well over dial up. The application was enabled for services; J2EE has a simple mechanism to access Web services and session beans can be easily exposed as Web services. It was also observed that it had open source options.

Recommendations
The Technology group recommended that the functionality provided by applications should be easily readable. It was suggested that well-defined coarser grained fażade beans and a set of business processes that use these facades should be used. This will help document the functionality better. Process designers must be used to visualize the business processes. The steps in the processes should be either fażade bean methods or other business processes (accessed as sub-processes). Between the business processes and the fażade bean method descriptions, a good handle can be got on the functionality offered by the applications.

Epilogue
By implementing the various performance and scalability recommendations provided, the company was able to successfully adopt the new technology.