 |
of Business Applications in Construction |
| Corresponding Author: Zarli, Alain |
| Author(s): Zarli, A. (*), Buckley, E. (+), and Richaud, O. (*) |
| Organisation(s): (*) Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment, Sophia Antipolis cedex (France), (+) Building Information Centre, Dublin (UK) |
| [WHY] Networking technology and object-oriented distributed systems
are today recognised as the foundations for concurrent engineering, in
order to satisfy the fundamental requirements of complex information management,
enterprise systems and fast reactive business, where applications have
to allow to access remote critical data from desktops widely spread over
the Internet, to support the browsing of data and documents by connecting
to enterprise servers, to provide appropriate access privilege according
users, partners or customers, etc.. Moreover, business is becoming increasingly
adaptive, and enterprises must be able to modify with high flexibility
their information systems. Thus, new applications make stringent demands
for scalability, robustness, dynamic reconfiguration and integrated security
solutions. This new generation of business applications to come will be
N-tier architectures, based upon distributed objects that are a major evolution
towards intelligent components, but are still not easy to integrate and
mainly deal with distribution aspects . Component-based development is
the next step in the evolution of object systems, and can help to deal
with new development challenges.
[WHAT] To ease the realisation of business applications while masking the complexity of the underlying “plumbing”, the WONDA project promotes the concept of business objects (BO ) and software components representing the enterprise business model by encapsulating business rules and aiming at providing transparently secure access to diverse electronic content and applications. The main WONDA objective is to develop an open and secure framework for BOs supporting Intranet applications, electronic publishing and electronic commerce, achieving this by automating as much as possible the work involved in creating and deploying software component-based applications, wrapping existing systems and data for presentation as components. [HOW] BOs are distributed objects (CORBA objects, considering OMG terminology) representing active things in a business domain. They enable a greater focus on business logic and application development, thus introducing a major enhancement for distributed infrastructures. But whereas CORBA provides a framework for distributed objects, a more elaborated framework to support BOs is required: in order to effectively, unambiguously and rapidly define BOs, WONDA builds upon CDL , which captures the semantics expressed in BOs and models attributes, operations, states, business rules, events and bi-directional relationships. From CDL specifications can be produced: - The corresponding IDL specifications of BOs according to the WONDA
framework, which is fundamentally oriented towards the distribution of
BOs.
Beyond CDL, BOs specification and implementation in WONDA will be investigated against emerging models, especially the future multi-language CORBA component model aiming to tightly integrate Java, EJB, and CORBA so that applications and objects can be used across more than EJB servers. Indeed, the CORBA model grants standard services layer for EJB to go against, and the complementary of these two models is a true potential basis for future large-scale component-based business applications. Eventually, a particular focus in WONDA is put as well on end users manipulation and multiple graphical views on BOs, through a Media Objects model and multi-modal GUI-oriented mechanisms, with notifications from BOs to Media Objects realised through a publish and subscribe technology, thus leading to loose coupling between Media Objects and BOs. [Intended Use] WONDA aims at a better WEB integration to enable electronic
publishing and commerce using BOs, and to foster a better industrial exploitation
of the large information sources and enterprises databases accessible through
the WEB, with a demonstration of results in the specific Building Construction
domain. The WONDA framework will be open technically in terms of standards,
configurability and modularity, offering a low entry level and unlimited
growth path strategically important in offering SMEs a solution that they
can afford, and supplying an incremental path which enables them to take
small or large steps at a time towards a complete Enterprise Information
System.
WONDA Project Information The research and results presented in this paper have been funded by
the Commission of the European Communities under the ESPRIT IV Program,
Project EP25741 WONDA (Domain 1: Software Technologies). This work has
been undertaken by the following partners:
The project represents 265 man-month of work for a duration of 2 years, and involves both research, developments and proof of concepts through the elaboration of pilots. It is expected to be a major step towards the delivery of WEB-oriented software components for the Building Construction sector. ---------------------
|
