The master database that ObjectRiver generates lets you build dynamic enterprise solutions that are driven by business events. A business event is created every time a business object in the database changes. These events contain the business objects that were changed during a transaction, and act as a focal point for determining who is interested in the event. This is the definition of an event-driven architecture. If the primary purpose of an application is to collect the most up-to-date master information, your business logic needs to forward these events to downstream warehousing solutions to keep their databases up-to-date. This is the simplest business process: Send updates to Warehouses.

The first step when developing a dynamic enterprise architecture is to build a model that describes enterprise information. This part of the model defines the business object assemblies. You will build your system based upon what you know about relational entities within the company. The model is very business and data centric, because you need to have a master database schema that closely represents the existing structure. The modeling process uses as much of the existing metadata, profiling, and warehousing information as possible. Defining the business objects is the most important part of modeling. Business processes could be another part of the model, where process objects are defined. Process objects are typically verb objects, while business objects are typically nouns. Process objects are only necessary when you will be building the processing yourself instead of using a third-party workflow or BPM system.

The Application Services Layer provides the functional components, or business objects. It ensures high-level scalability, performance, flexibility, and reliability. ObjectRiver business objects are currently represented as Java Data Objects (JDO) to the Business Services and Presentation/Interface Services layer.

The Business Services Layer is where technology meets business. In this layer, applications are created by combining business processes, business rules, workflow, and business objects exposed from the Application Services Layer. You will use this layer to quickly and effectively optimize your business processes to best suit customer and business needs. This layer also receives business events for rules and workflow processing.

The Presentation and Interface Services Layer provides users and external systems a way to communicate and interact with business processes and applications. This layer ties your Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, and Web-based applications to the business services layer.

The Event Services Layer contains an event factory that synchronizes business events created by transactions executed against the Data Services layer. These events contain business objects that were changed by a transaction. This layer contains a process that reads the events from a queue and runs rules and subscription logic to determine who is interested in them. These events and business objects are then put into a workflow or enterprise service bus for delivery to downstream applications and databases.

Applications, Rules, and Business Processes can be completely programmed with business objects composed from the application services layer. These objects are currently represented as Java Data Objects (JDO) and can be retrieved and updated seamlessly without the need for any SQL programming. This greatly simplifies the development of the system.

Technical Overview