InformationWeek

January 19, 1998

Component Frameworks Capture Business Logic

nlike GUI frameworks, which are a dime a dozen, enterprise frameworks have been slow to arrive. But that's changing, thanks to independent efforts by major enterprise vendors, such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Andersen Consulting. Even so, shrink-wrapped business frameworks will remain the ultimate goal of IT development for years to come.

"There aren't a lot of examples of enterprise application frameworks," says Brad Rubin, lead architect in Rochester, Minn., of IBM's effort to build an all-Java framework. "With the exception of GUI frameworks, it's a relatively new technology, and one that's extremely hard to do. It's much harder than building an application."

Rubin should know. IBM has spent the past two years building its all-Java framework, called the San Francisco project, w hich promises to deliver common Java objects for portable enterprise applications. After two years of effort, IBM delivered in August only part of the overall San Francisco solution.

Released were the Foundation Level, the object infrastructure that handles object security, transactions, persistence, and other object services; Common Business Objects, which standardize elements found in every business application, such as customer and address data; and a General Ledger module, the framework's first domain business process component.

Future domain components will address warehouse and order management, accounts payable, and accounts receivable. Other domains, such as manufacturing and human resources, and vertical industry solutions, addressing health care, insurance, and supply-chain management, may be added to the framework over time, Rubin says.

An early test version of Sun's new Java Electronic Commerce Framework was posted on the World Wide Web in November. JECF is Sun's Java architecture for secure electronic commerce over the Internet. Version 0.8 of the framework's application programming interface, which requires Java Development Kit 1.1.4, provides a set of standardized objects, JavaBeans, and tools for building enterprise-class electronic-commerce applications.

Included in the JECF framework are complete, ready-to-use tools, such as the Java Wallet, a user interface for online transactions; Java Cassettes, an implementation of standard online credit-card and check-payment transaction protocols; and the Java Shopping Cart, an applet that tracks online shoppers and lets them peruse, select, and purchase sale items offered online.

IBM and Sun aren't alone in lumbering toward a complete solution. The Eagle Architecture Specification is Andersen Consulting's ongoing component-framework development effort. The project started in 1992, when the firm set out to determine how to build systems that were dramatically more responsive to change. Mostly technology driven, the Eagle project also contains a h eavy dose of methodology, usability, and other systems-building disciplines.

As with other enterprise frameworks, Eagle targets vertical business sectors and is used to build component-based systems for banking, insurance, telecommunications, and manufacturing industries. Unlike IBM's and Sun's all-Java frameworks, Eagle is language independent and component-centric.

"To the extent we could all agree on a technology base to move forward on, yes, an organization could decide to do this stuff in Java," says Aaron Underwood in Chicago, the partner responsible Andersen Consulting's Eagle framework. "But why limit your solutions to Java? You can also do this with C++, Smalltalk-pick a technology. It doesn't matter which one, so long as the component model is uniform across the enterprise."

But while enterprise frameworks are finally crawling to the marketplace, in many cases IT developers won't be able to choose from a wide variety of complete business solutions for years to come. The reason: Industrial-stre ngth frameworks must generalize far more than a few on-screen widgets and user-interface elements, addressing business rules and services that must operate not only across departments, but also beyond international boundaries.

"Ideally, you're encapsulating how business is done in the United States; how that differs from France, Germany, and Italy; and what differences there are in the Anglo-Saxon accounting model vs., say, the Scandinavian one," says J.P. Morgenthal, president of NC.Focus, an advisory firm that specializes in distributed systems. "It's a much bigger investment than just building a single application, and it will be years before we see ubiquitous, commercially available enterprise frameworks-if ever."

For IT shops, the sooner they can leverage prebuilt enterprise frameworks in the way that they extend GUI classes today, the better. "Sure, I wish [IBM's] framework was completed," says Jeff Davey, information services manager at Bently Nevada, a Minden, Nev., manufacturer of specialized ele ctronics used in rotating engines. "Having a base to build upon is key. I could use my software developers to provide the business value on top of the prebuilt frameworks, rather than having to focus on that very complex infrastructure."

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