Application Patterns, Runtime Patterns and Product Mappings

Application Patterns

The application patterns define the interaction between the various application components. These are more abstract than the architectural patterns you may have studied elsewhere.

In the case of architectural patterns, the interaction between the components is defined. In the case of application patterns, we define the interaction between the applications. Such applications may be internal applications within an enterprise or may involve third-party applications.

Runtime Patterns

Runtime patterns describe the IT infrastructure. They defines the logical middleware components and their interactions with each other. We will discuss the following runtime patterns later in the chapter.

• Direct Connection
• Runtime patterns for Broker

The runtime patterns define the arrangement of nodes and how they connect to each other.

Product Mappings

Finally, the product mappings define the known software products for implementing the runtime patterns. The IBM catalog documents the mappings of IBM's various products such as IBM Websphere, DB2, and so on to implement the runtime patterns. As these are very vendor specific, we will not be discussing these in this book. An interested reader may refer to the IBM site (http://www.ibm.com/redbooks" target="_blank" rel="nofollow") for further details.

Guidelines

The application of these patterns requires a careful study of a business problem. For example, you may be developing a Portal. You will have to decide who are the users of this portal? What business services need to be offered to these clients, who are the business partners, and what kinds of interactions with the system they require, based on the answers to these questions, you will create a list of business assets needed to provide the services to clients.

These assets are then arranged in well-known patterns to achieve the desired business results. This results in creating enterprise architecture. We will not discuss the guidelines for the use of specific patterns here as we discuss them in more depth later in the chapter.