Reusable Business Tier Components: based on CLI and driven by a single wide typed service

Abstract

Call Level Interfaces (CLI) are software API used for building business tiers of relational database applications whenever performance is a key requirement. Nevertheless, their use is cumber-some, mainly in large database applications with many and complex Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) expressions. CLI are low level API conveying several difficulties during the development process of relational business tiers. Four of them are herein empha-sized: 1) Programmers need to master the schemas of the underlying databases; 2) the same CRUD expression is frequently re-written to address different business needs; 3) CLI are not suited to cope with evolving business tiers and, finally, 4) CLI do not provide any feature to decouple development process of relational business tiers from the development process of application tiers. To tackle these difficulties, this paper proposes an architecture for building reusable relational business tier components based on CLI herein referred to as the Reusable Business Tier Architecture (RBTA). It relies on a customizable wide typed service to address a business area, such as accountability. The typed service is able to manage CRUD expressions, deployed at runtime, on behalf of application tiers and in accordance with users’ needs. The only constraint is that the required service to manage each CRUD expression must be a sub-set of the implemented wide typed service. A proof of concept is also presented.