On Engineering Web-based Enterprise Applications

Enterprises are fast adopting SOA and On- Demand technologies in the context of building web-based applications and web-enabling existing applications. These give rise to a new set of engineering challenges. We discuss these challenges based on our experiences in building enterprise applications for Fortune 100 customers. Integration plays a key role in these applications and presents challenges such as the need to do partial integration, dealing with connectivity problems between systems, and integrating with legacy systems. We have used techniques such as caching meta-data and data about partner systems and adapting semantics based on user expectation to address performance issues in integration. In many cases, the customers require that the solution be available on-demand - i.e. hosted in a multi- tenant mode with the ability to share the entire hardware and software stack across multiple customers, the ability to perform software upgrades without any application down-time, and the ability to offer a range of customization features for its customers. We share our experiences and the challenges we faced in this context from the perspective of system engineers who have built this application