The Common Business Objects Pattern

A common business object is an object which is used often by web-based applications and services and is a widely acceptable entity in the running of the business. For example, a purchase order (PO), an invoice, and a customer profile could be considered common business objects, as these are parts of day-to-day business activity, but more importantly these have well-established and commonly accepted attributes and behavior. Developing common business objects from scratch each and every time one is needed is a resource-intensive, highly repetitive, and unnecessary undertaking. One of the challenges faced by today’s enterprise application developers is the lack of a generic approach for specifying the design, delivery, and processing of common business objects (CBO). In general, a CBO may contain one or more of the following: dynamic data object, static document, and workflow. Each time a custom application requires the use of a common business object, the developers either have to design it themselves, or use some language and/or platform and/or software dependent solution/library which might or might not address the needs of their application. This paper proposes a new pattern for specifying Common Business Objects for web applications. The objective of this pattern is to provide a generic approach to design extensible CBOs and CBO frameworks for business web applications.