Enterprise application development straddles many different technologies - the Application Chain. Application chain includes core technologies (AppCore), application and data integration technologies (AppConnect), application servers (AppServer), application bundles (AppBundle) and application federation technologies (AppFed).

Application Core

Core application development technologies include base platforms on which all software applications are built and foundation tools that are used to build those applications. Platform examples include, operating systems (Unix, Desktop Operating Systems) and database management systems. Tools include Assemblers, Linkers, C, C++ (an other language) compilers and debuggers.

AppCore ^TM Links: SANKHYA Tools Collection

Application Connection

Application Connection technologies include various standards, tools and platforms that allow software developers to build complex, inter-connected applications. Examples include platforms and tools for remote procedure calls and distributed object messaging.

AppConnect Links: SANKHYA Translation Framework , SANKHYA Varadhi

Application Server

Application Servers are platforms on which bundled applications can be built. Application servers often make it easy and efficient to develop and deploy bundled applications by providing a base platform that takes care of security, session and transaction management. Almost all application servers are well integrated with web servers, thereby enabling web based application development.

AppServer Links: Web Varadhi , Varadhi Services

Application Bundles

Many of the enterprise and embedded applications are really a complex combination of several less complex applications. These Application Bundles often provide several related (or sometimes unrelated) applications to their users while maintaining a common user interface. Application Bundles include applications like ERP, SCM, CRM, BPM and BI packages. Often Application Bundles can be intergrated with other Applications and Application Bundles giving rise to a whole new industry - Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).

AppBundle ^TM Links: Web Varadhi Application Bundles

Application Federation

Federated Applications are the applications of the future, these will consist of self organizing and self aggregating applications designed and built to interoperate and to automatically coalesce seamlessly into integrated applications without any human intervention. The Internet and some directory services already operate like a large federation of autonomous applications and form a mature platform for tomorrow's federated applications.

Example: Application coalescing refers to the following:

• Work group-1 installs Application instance-1 - i1
• Work group-2 installs Application instance-2 - i2

These workgroups never talk to each other or may not even know of each other (yet, they are part of some real or virtual organization let's say your Company). With a federated app, i1 and i2 should automatically know of each other and behave like a single application (where such behavior is desirable). Just like the Internet, E-mail or DNS.

AppFed ^TM Links: SANKHYA Research

Please contact architecture@sankhya.com for more information on the Application Chain and for scheduling a presentation at your site.