Exercise 7 - Application server platforms in e-commerce

1. Why is the perception getting stronger that integration will become a critical factor in coming days?

The ever-evolving internet technologies which includes software, hardware, and even the internet has been changing the landscape of businesses for years, through simplification and automation of existing processes, which helps provide them a competitive advantage.

As businesses grow electronically in this day and age, and this also means through communication between other business (i.e. b2b). Integration will always be a major factor, as all business not only run separate systems on different platforms, in different languages, geographically dispersed (the list goes on). But to stay competitive they must integrate and this I believe is why integration is becoming increasingly more of a critical factor.

One of the greatest examples on the internet and which currently businesses use or are looking to use are webservices. This technology has the ability to share specific information with partners, clients, other businesses so that they can utilise this information provided with their internal systems they have and also vis-versa. Another older technology which also did something similar but was not exactly realtime was FTP


2. What is the relationship of AJAX to JQuery (jquery.com) and the lightweight Web 2.0 javascript framework called MooTools (mootools.net) within the enterprise software architecture?
Lets first start off by defining what AJAX is and what JQuery and MooTool.net are:

AJAX
AJAX (shorthand for Asynchronous Javascript and XML) is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications (Wikipedia, 2010). AJAX is not a technology itself, but a group of technologies such as HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, all integrated to increase the interactivity and develop dynamic interfaces on web pages.

JQuery JQuery is a web framework that utilises javascript to help simplify the development of web 2.0 applications. It provides a framework in which developers can use many feature rich functions and methods (also including AJAX) to help provide feature rich web applications.

MooTools.net
MooTools.net and JQuery are very similar in that they are a web 2.0 framework that provide developers feature rich functions and methods (including AJAX integration) to help make web 2.0 applications.

To sum things up JQuery and MooTools.net are just two frameworks you can use. They overlap in alot of functionality, but it just depends on what your preference is.


3. What are the similarities between object-orientated development using model-view-controller (MVC) in Ruby on Rails 2.0 and Action Script 2.0 (Flash animations)?

Basically both these frameworks implement the same design pattern of MVC, and are both are based on an object orientated language. The only main difference between these two are really how and what the frameworks are utilised for. Ruby On Rails 2.0 is used for Website and application development, while Action Script 2.0 is really dedicated to Flash animations and for a specific environment.


4. What does it mean to develop RESTful practices into our web applications?
Representational State Transfer (REST) for short is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the world wide web. The term was introduced by Roy Fielding in 2000 in one of his doctoral dissertations (Wikipedia, 2010). A concise definition by Roy Fielding is as follows “[REST] is intended to evoke an image of how a well designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through an application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use.” RESTful web applications conform to these principles, thus guaranteeing uniform access to resources regardless of their location, enabling easy integration and loose coupling between applications. Building on that, RESTful web applications make it easy to provide device-specific responses and search engine optimized URLs. (Kuhrwahl & Wopperer, n.d.)

References
Wikipedia. Ajax Programming Retrieved 01/04/2010, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

Wikipedia. Representational State Transfer Retrieved 23/03/2010, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer

Andreas Kuhrwahl, W. W., Thomas Jachmann. Chapter 4. RESTful web applications Retrieved 23/03/2010, 2010, from http://jsf-spring.sourceforge.net/reference/ch04.html