How to decide about the Architecture on a big enterpriser application ?

Question

Hi,
As u know there are lots of items to choose from when building a web based enterprise system with j2ee technologies.
these choices may be from different patters (MVC,FrontController,...) and different frameworks(JSF,struts,...) for different layers(Presentation,DAL,...) of the application.
and i know that most of them are project dependent. but is there a source for this big decision as a guide ?
we are going to develope a web based and distributed total system(MIS,...) with around 130 subsystems ;
any propose on the architecture would be of great help. there must be some old successful systems with known architectures.
thax

Answer 1

Hi,
As u know there are lots of items to choose from when
building a web based enterprise system with j2ee
technologies.
these choices may be from different patters
(MVC,FrontController,...) and different
frameworks(JSF,struts,...) for different
layers(Presentation,DAL,...) of the application.
and i know that most of them are project dependent.
but is there a source for this big decision as a guide
we are going to develope a web based and distributed
total system(MIS,...) with around 130 subsystems ;
any propose on the architecture would be of great
help. there must be some old successful systems with
known architectures.
thaxHi there,
It really (as you say) depends on the project and the problem domain, there is no Golden Hammer in J2EE. However there are some considerations you might want to take into account, bear in mind that without knowing hte problem domain this could all be useless waffle :-):
1.) 'Future Proofing'. What technologies are likely to be supported well into the future and what will the average developer be comfortable with, also what is an easy framework for developers to follow? It sounds like you'll have a large team on this one and several replacement developers will probably come in along the way
So for the front-end you could argue for Struts (will definately be going strong as it will be closely tied in with the new JSF spec) or plain JSP/TagLib with a Servlet Controller MVC pattern. solution.
Moving further into your layers you definately want to have a Facade between your Business layer and your Data Access layer, there are so many competing technologies in this area that' it's wise to be able to mix and match at a later date.
2.) Another thing you might want to consider is definately representing your business data in XML. It could be a solution for having a consistant data transfer layer for those subsystems! But of course translating XML to Javabeans and back again can get expensive...
Well you could write a book on this (and several notable people have). I'd recommend that hte project budget shells out on J2EE Design Patterns by Oreilly for you, it'll help you clarify some ideas and more importantly help you avoid the common mistakes :-)
Hope that helps!
Karianna