Introducing the StockBroker Case Study

A single example, the StockBroker case study, will be used as a consistent thread running throughout the chapters in this part of the book. We regard the StockBroker scenario as a fair representation of the kind of service-oriented distributed system that you might encounter in the real world, and toward which the Distributed System Designers are targeted. In this context, an example based on the usual personal CD cataloging program simply wouldn't do justice to the tools.

If you refer to our summary of the visual designers previously discussed, you'll notice that the diagrams included items with names such as StockBroker, MarketMaker, DealingApp, and StockDatabase, which are the essential items from which the case study is composed. In the following chapters, you'll meet those figures again in the following contexts:

• In Chapter 2, you'll learn how to use Application Designer to sketch out the overall structure of the StockBroker example in terms of applications and the connections between them. You'll also learn how to generate and locally deploy implementation code directly from that design.

• In Chapter 3, we'll define a logical datacenter using Logical Datacenter Designer to host the case study example, independent of the application design devised in Chapter 2.

• Chapter 4 pulls the two together by showing how a combination of System Designer and Deployment Designer may be used to bind the applications from the application diagram onto the datacenter defined by the LDD.

• In Chapter 5, you'll revisit the implementation code from Chapter 2 as a vehicle for learning how Class Designer may be used to model the internal implementations of each application.

Though a single case study example is used for consistency, and to give credibility to the overall process, we will step outside of that example as necessary to demonstrate concepts and mechanisms that do not fit neatly into that scheme.