5.5. Life after CORE

The impact of the CORE system within AT&T Unisource was significant in a couple of ways. First, the business benefit resulting from automating the call-routing processes was substantial. Second, the architectural reference provided by the system clearly demonstrated the abundance of “out-of-the-box” services the J2EE platform provides for complex heterogeneous environments.

5.5.1. Business

The CORE project delivered on its promise as a robust, user-friendly, and scaleable system. It met fairly sophisticated business requirements, yet proved both responsive and stable. It provided ease of use, yet still delivered information that contributed to the cost optimization of network traffic.

The fact that the use of technology in this area of the business was relatively new increased the importance of the CORE system becoming widely accepted by its users. This success has been substantiated by the high level of user demand for additional functionality enhancements to future releases of the system.

5.5.2. Development

The CORE application, the J2EE platform, and the Borland AppServer allowed the development efforts at AT&T Unisource to shift focus from primarily isolated departmental projects with a “one application, one solution” approach to a more enterprise-wide approach.

In addition, where other component models were available that provided some reusability, they also required a considerable amount of proprietary code to deliver features that are part of a standardized J2EE architecture. Thus J2EE technology reduced the resource burden in building new systems and maintaining existing ones. The new architecture also exhibited a cleaner separation between presentation, business, system, and database tiers, which structure allowed a considerable increase in the levels of parallel development.

The J2EE platform also provided the ability to distribute the tiers of the system to their appropriate places, irrespective of platform or vendor. This ensures true scalability and vendor independence. Using these technologies within the systems department has provided teams with proof that the J2EE platform delivers an architecture that displays the “write once, run anywhere” approach to development.

CORE provided the following benefits

• A clear, structured demarcation among all application tiers, improving accuracy and reducing research time for impact analysis in the light of change requests.

• Reusability, with more than 75 percent of the programming effort reusable across similar projects.

• Reduced time to market through a more usable and structured business object model that requires enhancements to focus only on extensibility, not on code rewrites or system rearchitecture.

• Greatly reduced maintenance costs and reduced dependence on vendor-specific tiers, such as the RDBMS or operating system.

• Architecture that has proved more scaleable, reusable, and future-proof than ever before. An architecture that has not been written from the ground up, but compliments a feature set and suite of services that has been tried and tested in the marketplace, providing a natural and logical extension to the problem domain.

• A repository of components that can be clearly identified for all future developments.

• A new, robust, and scalable entity object model that reduces costs and development time, automatically including connection pooling, object pooling, security, and transactional services.

• Significant reduction in development source code, allowing greater refinement and concentration of development effort.

• Clearer understanding of business logic for developers, thanks to an architecture that focuses much more on the business requirements.

Development with the J2EE platform for both the CORE application and other systems within AT&T Unisource will continue to evolve as enhancements to EJB and other technologies are released. These enhancements will aid the pursuit of reduced dependence on hardware vendors, database vendors, and proprietary development practices, further improving development productivity and application performance.

For more information about Borland, visit http://www.borland.com/appserver. For more information about ATT-Unisource, visit http://www.att-unisource.net.