Core Principles of Application Composition for Enterprise Software

To keep up enterprise systems with the pace and flexibility of modern business, software vendors have been further enhancing application development paradigms. Extension of software modularization concept with service-orientation and model driven development brought IT systems to the next level, to the level of composite applications. Application composition is the means of building software and integrating existing components into information systems. Software products built according to the principles of application composition are composite applications. Development of such applications assumes dealing with complex business processes and data structures and often involves modeling of them to handle their complexity. This paper addresses the approach of application composition, discusses its fundamental principles and describes the notion of a composite application and its characteristics. Technical and architectural concerns for composite applications are presented.