After developing the business architecture and the data architecture for a specific business enterprise, you can turn to the application architecture. At this point you are using both a business perspective and an information technology (IT) perspective because applications are the tools that automate or assist business processes. As such the application architecture provides the plan—the blueprint—for individual applications, their interactions, and their relationships to business process that you have identified in the business architecture. The data architecture provides the overall framework for organizing the data stores, which the applications use.
At the highest level, the application architecture should provide a framework for developing applications that work across multiple business areas and that can accommodate changes over time. A diagram showing the canonical models of typical applications as well as the implementation view of applications can help clarify the application architecture that your organization plans to use. For example, a canonical web application model might be a typical one with three layers—presentation, business logic, and data—as shown in the following diagram:
For an enterprise implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA), you can also show the high-level view of the implementation, including the services that represent specific business functions. For example, here is a high-level view of applications for an insurance claims business:
In this diagram, the hexagonal blocks show various services such as member information, claims, and claims payment. Requests from clients come to an enterprise service manager that implements the workflow logic and decided what service to invoke and in which order. The enterprise service manager returns the results back to the clients. A diagram such as this one can be useful in providing a high-level view of the application architecture.
Tags: enterprise architecture EA architecture application modeling SOA service
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