- Models for e-Business
- Stakeholder Communities
- Road Map for This Book
Road Map for This Book
Figure 1-2 presents a road map for the topics in this book, and the following sections explain the contents of the three parts of the book. Each chapter concludes with a list of steps for success. The purpose of these steps is to distill general principles for modeling XML applications and to organize them along the guidelines of the Unified Process. Consider these steps as a supplement to rather than a replacement of the Unified Process. Their goal is to give you a road map that helps achieve successful completion of your own XML applications.
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Part I. Foundations
Chapter 2 introduces XML by comparing it with a similar application of HTML. The example, using the Rich Site Summary (RSS) vocabulary for news headlines, builds a foundation for using the same vocabulary in future chapters. The chapter covers the center part of Figure 1-2 by describing XML documents and Document Type Definition (DTD) schemas, plus use of XSLT to transform XML into HTML for presentation.
Chapter 3 introduces UML models, thus covering the upper part of the road map. Each of the UML diagrams is described based on its role in an iterative development process using the RSS example from Chapter 2.
Chapter 4 analyzes the use case requirements for e-business integration. This chapter introduces the Catalog Markup Language (CatML) that is used throughout the remainder of the book. CatML was conceived and implemented strictly for the purposes of this book.
Chapter 5 analyzes the use case requirements for wired and wireless portals. "MyCat" is introduced as a personalized portal for our catalog exchange service example.
Part II. XML Vocabularies
Part II focuses entirely on the analysis and design of XML vocabularies using UML class diagrams. All examples are based on the CatML vocabulary.
Chapter 6 describes XML vocabulary design and works through seven design issues that must be considered when mapping UML class models to XML. UML object diagrams are used to describe the mapping scenarios.
Figure 1-2 Components of an e-Business application
Chapter 7 takes the next step into distributed applications and describes four XML linking mechanisms used to map UML relationships into XML hyperlinks. This chapter completes our design specification for the CatML vocabulary.
Chapter 8 provides a detailed introduction and comparison of XML DTDs and Schemas.
Chapter 9 describes the criteria and production rules used to generate XML DTDs and Schemas from UML class diagrams. Alternative rules and trade-offs are analyzed for producing relaxed versus strict schemas. All examples are based on generating schemas for CatML.
Part III. Deployment
Chapter 10 returns to the e-business integration issues introduced in Chapter 4. Two detailed examples are described using XSLT to transform the CatML vocabulary to and from the RosettaNet standard XML vocabulary.
Chapter 11 probes deeper into deployment of the portal that was introduced in Chapter 5. XSLT is again used to transform CatML, but this time into HTML for presentation in the Apache Jetspeed portal framework.
Chapter 12 outlines the common features of current e-business architectures for deploying B2B applications. As part of the architecture, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is introduced as an XML-based messaging standard for interconnecting distributed components.
Steps for Success
Identify e-business drivers. What strategies of your business are driving the need for integration? What are your customers' and suppliers' strategies? Where are your competitors headed?
Identify stakeholder communities. A successful XML application must consider the requirements of all major stakeholder communities, including consumers, suppliers, business analysts, system integrator specialists, Web application specialists, and content developers.
Create a high-level use case diagram for your system context.
For each use case, identify its primary goals and assumptions.
Identify an initial set of workflow processes among the stakeholders.