Choosing the Right Technology

The requirements list and the use case diagram were sent to the senior technical architect for a high level proposal on the technology to be used for implementing the system. The technical architect considered the following factors. The proposed technology should:

• Support rapid application development to provide a fully functional helpdesk system to the users in a short span of time

• Support distributed component architecture for ease of extensibility, support of heterogeneous operating environments, and proper load sharing

• Adhere to the corporate policy of not being dependent on a single server vendor

• Provide system-level services like transactions, security, and communication, so that the application developers can concentrate on developing the business logic, and make as much use of application server support as possible

• Enable easy deployment of the application

Taking all the above factors into consideration a technology based on J2EE was proposed. It was decided to partition the system into two loosely coupled applications, a case logging system and a case management system. Since the relevant users require web access to the applications, it was decided to engineer them as web applications running in J2EE web containers. A MOM solution was proposed to couple the case logging and the case management systems. Due to the support for standards-based solution, JMS was chosen as the preferred MOM solution.

The proposed architecture recommended running the case logging system, the case management system, and the message system in isolation from each other to avoid mutual impact and security implications. It was further recommended to use WebLogic 6.0 for running the web applications and the message broker because of its 100% J2EE compatibility. But it was also suggested that the system be implemented in a vendor-neutral manner, without using any of the value-added features provided the vendor that are not compliant with the J2EE specification, so that switching vendors would not be a complex issue in the future. A fully J2EE compliant implementation would enable the use of three different vendors for the case logging, the case management and the messaging systems.

A high-level diagram depicting the technical architecture of the system is shown below: