Those of us of a particular vintage will remember green screen applications which were essentially character based screens to allow you to communicate with your applications. We will also remember the fact that these applications generally had response times of less than a second from the time you hit ‘enter’. There was a general rule of thumb that if the response took any longer than 1 second, the user’s attention would be lost and thus reduced productivity was the outcome.
Moving forward we now have visually quite stunning graphical interfaces with which to communicate with our applications, however, how many of these provide “delivery times” of 10’s of seconds between interactions ? This is generally because the screen being displayed is made up of many parts and takes many round trips to the system to complete the screen.
This does not have to be the case. With a well designed Service Oriented Architecture, one or a limited number of services can generally provide all the information required for one screen. This means that the data to build the screen can be retrieved in less than a second. The additional ‘beautification’ that admittedly makes the screen look good is normally static in that it doesn’t change from display to display and can be cached locally.
Using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and caching of graphical images, it is therefore possible to have the benefit of a fully graphical interface with response times of less than a second reminiscent of the green screen era. Many studies have shown that such responsive applications improve the productivity and job satisfaction of people using those applications many times over.
The SOA Gateway will enable you to create the services that will provide such an architecture.
No comments:
Post a Comment