We have decided on the name Open-Enterprise since we feel that this describes what we are doing. The meeting yesterday morning went very well with Marc and myself slating out the first bit of work to be done. The list falls roughly into Marc working on the HR interface while I am working on the core data access, service layer, and util classes. We hope to build very light weight modules that can be modified and maintened easily. Part of or discussion centered on whether or not the service layer would be required since what we see happening mostly in the module is CRUD database activity. We decided on a mixed approach using the ServiceLocator pattern attaching our DAO’s to the ServiceLocator. If we need a further seperation between view and data access layer we can simply place a service in between the two layers and redirect the calls from view layer, using the ServiceLocator, to a newly created Service component.
Another part of the dicussion centered around how SOA, Mule, BPEL, and the OE modules in general would remain generic but yet be able to leverage the information from other modules without braking with our highly decoupled model. It is my opinion that WS Interface specifications will need to be generated for each module in the OE suite. The combination of these specifications will form what I term the Eco system that will sit on top a generic service bus (Mule).
While researching Mule last night I ran into a couple of terms that I had heard used but was unfamiliar with their meanings.
The Terms: Staged Event-Driven Architecture SEDA and Representational State Transfer REST or REST(ful) systems.
These links helped me to understand the terms a little better.
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/
http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html
We hope to have some architectual drawings a general road map and some sample code soon.
