An enterprise application is a business application which is complex, scalable, distributed, component-based, and mission-critical. They may be deployed on various platforms across corporate networks, intranets, or the Internet. They are data-centric, user-friendly, and meet strict requirements for security, administration, and maintenance.
Designing and developing such enterprise applications means satisfying hundreds or thousands of separate requirements. The development decisions you make to satisfy each requirement might affect many other requirements adversely- and the failure to meet any of these requirements can result in the failure of the entire project!
So You need professionals and people with expertise in this field.
The Enterprise Application Model
The Enterprise Application Model is a design tool.
Designing large-scale distributed applications requires a way to simplify complexity. By grouping similar requirements together into a few abstract categories, you can approach them in a more orderly manner. It allows you to break the overall enterprise application development problem into a set of manageable tasks. When you understand the interactions between requirement groups you can tackle them in a systematic manner.
The Enterprise Application Model guides you step by step through the process of designing and building a large-scale commercial application, by organizing the thousands of design requirements into a few sub-models, and showing how they interact. It shows how to maintain balance between the competing requirements of every design decision.
The model is an orderly compilation of all requirements that contribute to implementing every enterprise application, divided into six specific “sub-models.” The following table lists these requirements as items to define or deliver within each model.
| Model | Requirements |
| The development model | Development team, Development process, Testing, Application milestones,Project management, Source code , and deliverable |
| The business model | Business goals ,cost of development, Returns on investment Resources required, Time constraints Security and maintenance, infrastructure, Business rules and policies |
| The user model | User interface Ease-of-use requirements Training and documentation Application support User’s desktop configuration and network connection |
| The logical model | Logical structure of the application Object and data modeling Business objects and services Interface definitions |
| The technology model | Component development or reuse Development tools Deployment platforms System and database technologies Clustering, pooling, and messaging technologies |
| The physical model | Physical application architecture Distribution and interconnection of components End product of the iterative inputs of each of the other sub-models |
