The IOP Approach to Enterprise Frameworks

This paper introduces the Internet Operating Platform (IOP), an enterprise framework for large scale software development. In addition to obeying to important standards (UML, XML, Java) an enterprise framework has to fulfil three basic requirements. First of all, it has to be broad and needs an elaborate architecture complementing standards and technologies rather than purely connecting them. Therefore, IOP combines UML modeling, workflow specification, code generation, run-time configuration, and component architectures. Secondly, an enterprise framework allows most developers to concentrate on business leaving technical issues to a few specialists. Therefore, IOP abstracts from underlying technologies in the areas of front-ends (HTML, XML, Java), communication protocols (FTP, HTTP, JMS, RMI), distributed components (EJB, CORBA), and persistence (virtual memory, XML, SQL92, SQL:1999). All corresponding drivers are replaceable and can even coexist. Third, an enterprise framework has to provide micro solutions on both technical and business levels. Thus, IOP provides amongst others built-in services and components like session management on a technical level and content management on a business level.