Summary

Designing for rapidity requires making decisions during the definition of a system's architecture. These decisions impact the ability of the project team to deliver an IT solution within the customer's timeframe.

Some of the factors we discussed in this chapter when timeliness of delivery was a key concern of the customer included the following:

• Delivery timeframe is a contributing factor to the definition of the system's architecture

• Build software that is orthogonal using a layered architecture

• Design the system for testing from the outset

• Work to the strengths of the team

• Adopt proven frameworks

• Keep designs simple and be wary of designing for future reuse

• Avoid building of unnecessarily complex system architectures by using only the J2EE technologies that help solve the business problem

In the next chapter, we examine the benefits of modeling tools for rapid development and explore how the process of modeling can help the software engineer in the task of building enterprise applications.

Additional Information

The collection of J2EE patterns published by Sun Microsystems is available online as part of Sun's Java BluePrints program, a developer resource aimed at defining a set of best practices for building Java applications. The Java BluePrints program, along with the core J2EE patterns, resides at http://java.sun.com/blueprints.

The two J2EE architectures presented in this chapter were based upon some of the architectures presented by Rod Johnson in his excellent book Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Programming [Johnson, 2002]. This title offers guidance and advice for applying J2EE technologies to real-world business problems.

Patterns in architecture are becoming increasingly important. Martin Fowler's book, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture [Fowler, 2002], introduces a range of patterns for building enterprise architectures.