A stable application architecture is of paramount
importance to ADB

 

Since 1994, ADB has been developing WorkMate, a heavyweight Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solution. The development of WorkMate has mainly been driven by the demanding requirements from the oil & gas industry, and has given ADB a very thorough understanding of what is required to build successful solutions for electronic procurement. WorkMate was originally implemented on client/server architecture, mainly with PowerBuilder and Oracle as the underlying technologies. 

In 1998, ADB realized what influence the new XML technology would have in driving the idea of “The Business Internet” forward. So, to be prepared to meet the new demands, technologically as well as functionally, we designed a new XML avvy Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) named “Workmate Distributed Architecture” (WDA). As a result of this, all major procurement and supplier-collaboration functionality of WorkMate is now based on WDA.

It is no surprise that new technologies occasionally emerge and change the rules on how to design and develop IT solutions. Experience also proves that even though the technology changes frequently, the business processes are more stable over time. Based on these facts, WDA is designed on a composition of technology agnostic design patterns, and are currently implemented based on the Microsoft .Net® platform.

The main strategy and the main goals for ADB using WDA for development
of WorkMate can be summarized into:

Utilizing the Business Internet in being Internet and XML savvy
WDA is not adapted to Internet and XML, it is designed on the rules and the principles of these technologies. As a result if this, WDA supports all major Internet protocols to meet the demanding challenges involved in integration and collaboration with other parties. Further more, all flow of data, internally as well as externally, is based on XML using SOAP. This gives WorkMate a unique ability to easily adopt emerging methodologies and patterns in a broader distributed environment, such as The Business Internet.

Service oriented vs. sealed monoliths.
Even though Web Service Description Language (WSDL) is a fairly new technology, WDA was already in 1999 designed on the principle of web services. As a result of this, WorkMate has an extremely modular design. Such a quality gives us the ability to, with relatively small effort, extend and modify application behaviour based on emerging customer demands.

Open standards
Experience tells us that one of the major criteria of success in deploying an e-procurement solution is the ability to make this solution collaborate seamlessly with existing applications and infrastructure at the customer’s site. To enforce this ability, ADB has a strong focus on utilizing open standards when choosing integration technologies.

Collaboration - extended business processes
In a procurement scenario, the processing taking place at the buyer’s site is only a part of the procurement business process, where other parties may be the supplier and the financials. To be able to maximize the payback of optimizing such a process, we believe the ability to focus on the complete process is of significant importance. To support this idea, WDA is designed with a strong focus on application integration.

Loosely coupled - platform transparency
Over the last decades we have seen numerous methodologies used in attempts to build robust, long lasting and cost effective application integrations, with limited success. Based on these facts, combined with the abilities of the XML technology, a new methodology has emerged over the last couple of years – Loosely coupled integrations. ADB is a strong supporter of this methodology, and we therefore implement all application integrations according to these rules. Our experience proves that the results are: Shorter development time, lower cost, more robust integrations, platform transparency, and to some extent, application transparency.

Side-by-side versioning - highly customizable and stable platform
One of the major challenges in a distributed environment is to avoid conflicts between different versions of different components. One of the reasons for this is probably the lack of control from one single party. To neutralize such potential conflicts, WDA supports a side-by-side versioning scheme. This makes us able to change or upgrade one part of a system without creating conflicts or destabilizing other parts of the system. As a result of this, ADB are able to support a very high degree of flexibility in both sub-application releases as well as application customization.

 

Stateless architecture – high scalability
WDA is a stateless architecture, and therefore supports both web-farms and clustering as means for scaling.