The Assignment: Specification and Marking Criteria

Enterprise software platforms are designed to simplify complex enterprise problems for the development, deployment, and maintenance of multi-tier enterprise solutions. In this assignment, you are to write a research report to critically review the current enterprise computing platforms: Java EE and .NET. In your review, you are to compare and contrast the major components of the two platforms and assess the potential impacts when choosing one of them for your businesses. To complete this report, you need to have good understanding of the required issues and are expected to do personal research.

The report is to be structured as an academic report and the sections must be titled and numbered. Your work must be appropriately referenced using the Harvard (author-date) referencing style. The length of the report should be about 2,500 words. You are not required to provide an Executive Summary for the report. An Exemplar for Writing a Simple Academic Technical Report is available on the course web site; you should read it before writing your report.

In your report, you must address the following issues:

Part 1: Introduction:

1. What is enterprise computing and what are the available technologies for it?
2. What are you going to cover in the remainder of this report?

Part 2: Software modelling

1. Compare the two platforms as a layered model

• What are the benefits of a layered design?
• What are the main components of each layer and their functions?

2. Compare the two platforms as a component-based model

• Describe the component model of each platform
• How to specify component behaviours in each platform

Part 3: Runtime framework

1. What is the runtime foundation of each platform?
2. What services are provided by each runtime framework?
3. What are the benefits of providing these services?
4. How does each framework support component packaging and deployment?

Part 4: Enterprise application integration

1. How does each platform support Business to Business (B2B) collaboration via web service?2
2. How does each platform support the connection to the legacy business systems?

Part 5: Pros and cons for the two platforms

1. Contrast the two platforms for types of technology and number of vendors
2. Contrast the two platforms for portability
3. Contrast the two platforms for software development tools and languages support

Part 6: Conclusion

1. What platform is more suitable for your business
2. What will be the impacts of using it?