Development of industrial, information systems on the Web using business components

Web technologies, as tools, are most popular and widely used today not only in the everyday life but in industry as well. Examples of such technologies are the browsers, search engines, related communication protocols and their implementations, mechanisms for creating dynamic and active Web sites, security mechanisms, etc. These technologies lead to requirements for substantial changes in the methodologies for development and deployment of all systems and subsystems, which constitute any business process. Changes and/or new decisions are necessary to make possible the modem Web-based technological tools to be used effectively for Web-based business processes. A methodology for developing business software components as basic building elements of industrial information systems, implemented and deployed in Web-based computing environment is proposed and discussed in this paper. The methodology is based on the idea of creating a unified framework for representing business activities as a basis for business process modeling. Respective models, methods and techniques ensure the business objects and components to applied to currently most accepted three-tier Web application architecture using XML document as distributed object. For illustrative purposes only the proposed methodology is applied step by step, with respective comments, to developing a part of inventory subsystem of industrial information system as a case study. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.