A stable application architecture is of paramount importance to ADB

 

Since 1994, ADB has been developing WorkMate, a comprehensive 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 enterprise level solutions for e-procurement and CMMS. 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 savvy Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) named “Workmate Distributed Architecture” (WDA). As a result of this, all major e-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 as a composition of technology agnostic design patterns. WDA was originally implemented on Windows DNA®, state of the art technology of the time, but it is now completely Microsoft .Net® based. This transition was done part by part over a period of 7 years and in a pace dictated by application and customer demands. The most important fact is that the architecture has not changed in this process, only the implementing technology, which in our opinion proves the robustness and the quality of the architecture design. This puts us in the unique position that we never have to consider to re-write all our applications because a new technology is introduced, rather we constantly evaluates where and in what pace we can utilize new technology to the best of our applications and our customers.

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

Utilizing the Business Internet by 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. Furthermore, all flow of data, internally as well as externally, is based on XML messaging. 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, with relatively small effort, the ability to extend and modify application behavior based on emerging customer demands.

Open standards
Experience have learned us that one of the major criteria of success in deploying enterprise level solutions, such as e-procurement, 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 implementing e-procurement in an organization, we believe that the ability to focus on the complete process is of high 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 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.

 

Scale on demand
Cost-effective scaling requires the ability to scale on demand, as opposed to dimension and oversized system to meet expected demands in the future. WDA is designed to support both web-farms and clustering as means for scaling, which enables our customers to implement a scaling on demand strategy.