Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 10, numbers 1 and 2, 2017 // View article

Interface Construction, Deployment and Operation – a Mystery Solved

Authors:
Alexander Hagemann
Gerrit Krepinsky
Christian Wolf

Keywords: interface; interface aspects; communication requirements; communication services; messaging; communication error handling; business process; interface design; interface versioning; interface migration; interface operation

Abstract:
The increasing digitalization pressure within the industry resulted in a continuously growing demand on IT supported business processes over the past decades. This pressure changed singular mainframe applications into large, distributed application landscapes usually operated in a 24/7 hours mode. Simultaneously, this enforced increased support demands to the application management as well as further application integration requirements during development. Therefore, decoupled, robust and supervise able applications are required. Since the behavior of these applications is determined solely by their communication behavior on interfaces, it becomes apparent that interfaces are of overall significance within such distributed application landscapes. But in our experience, interfaces usually do not get the required attention during design, construction, deployment and operation, which is in contrast to their importance. Instead, only technical reports like, e.g., syntactical descriptions, are usually given and important functional as well as operational aspects have been omitted. This leads to unstable and unnecessary complex interface implementations threatening the 24/7 hours mode of operation. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper contributes a new comprehensive approach on interface design, construction, deployment and operation for distributed application landscapes. This includes guidelines for a functional interface design and interface migration patterns for deploying application interfaces into a 24/7 hours running environment.

Pages: 61 to 78

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2017. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2017

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628