Enterprise SOA

What are the special needs of composite applications?

Composite applications face problems previous generations of applications did not have to grapple with.

One problem is distributed persistence, which refers to data scattered across a potentially far-flung network of business objects and other structures connected by enterprise services and unaware of each other. It becomes necessary to create mechanisms capable of resolving that distributed persistence, two of which SAP NetWeaver provides: MDM and the SAP NetWeaver BI data warehousing ability. Analytic services are expected to compile and process data from this distributed source and route the results in the right form to the right UI at the right time.

Another problem is flexibility. To handcode composites from scratch is too costly to be effective. Composites need to be intrinsically flexible enough to change easily and quickly without a large investment of time and resources. This is where modeling comes in.

It's also expected that modern composite applications will include or integrate collaborative tools such as email, instant messaging, and lightweight project management tools. Equally important are search and knowledge management capabilities for unstructured documents and information. So are UIs for mobile devices; composite applications simply have higher user expectations than their predecessors. (For more information on composite applications, their architecture, and how SAP supports them, see Chapter 12.)