Enterprise Application

In the early part of this century, I worked on my book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. One of the problems I had when writing the book was how to title it, or rather what to call the kinds of software systems that I was writing about. I've always been conscious that my experience of software development has always been focused on one particular form of software - things like health care records, foreign exchange trading, payroll, and lease accounting. These are very different to embedded software inside printers, games, flight control software, or telephone switches. I needed a name to describe these kinds of systems and settled on the term "enterprise application".

As I so often have to say, there is no formal definition for this term. However there are some characteristics that enterprise applications have in common.

Enterprise applications usually have a lot of persistent data, usually managed by some kind of database management system. Usually this database is relational, but increasingly we're seeing NoSQL alternatives. This data will usually be longer lasting and more valuable than the applications that process it.

This data is accessed and manipulated concurrently. The numbers vary a lot, in-house applications may have a few tens of users, but customer-facing web applications can easily have tens of thousands. Despite high levels of concurrency, many enterprise application developers don't think much about critical regions, race conditions and other elements of classic concurrent programming. Instead they build their thinking on top of transactions managed by databases or specialized transaction management tools.

With so much data, enterprise applications have a lot of user interface screens to handle it. Usually the same data is manipulated in different ways in different contexts. Users vary from regular to occasional users, so the interfaces need to match different levels of familiarity. There is also a significant amount of offline (batch) processing that is easily forgotten.

Even if you are building a brand new enterprise application, you don't do so in isolation. Instead you'll need to integrate with other enterprise applications. These systems are built by a wide range of teams, some from vendors who sell to many customers, others built internally just for your organization. These applications will have been written over many decades in a host of different technologies, some of which you'll have to ask your mother about. There are many integration mechanisms to deal with - file exchange, shared databases, messaging middleware. Every so often there will be an attempt to rationalize all this communication technology, but they never entirely succeed leaving behind more complexity in their wake.

Even when different applications access the same data there is considerable conceptual dissonance between them, a customer may mean something quite different to the sales organization than it does to technical support. The same sounding entity has different fields in different contexts, or worse have fields with the same name yet different meanings.

And then there's so-called "business logic". When you are writing an operating system you strive to keep the whole thing logical and stive to discover and implement simplifications to keep the software straightforward and reliable. But business rules are given to you as they stand, and if you want to change them you need sixty-seven meetings and three vice-presidents retiring. They are usually a haphazard array of strange conditions that interact in surprising ways. Their insanity derives from a good reason, each one is a case where salesman could close a particular deal by offerring some special one-off condition. Do this a thousand times and you have the complex business "illogic" that lies in the heart of many enterprise applications.

Enterprise applications can be large or small. Often discussion focuses on large, complex applications, but there is also a challenge for smaller applications that need to be built quickly. Big systems make a lot of noise when they go wrong, yet the cumulative effect of small systems can have a surprising effect on an enterprises's health.

Coming up with names for things is always tricky. You need to use a minimum number of words, and want them to trigger the right connotations in the readers' minds, so that you don't have to constantly remind them what the definition means. On the whole I've been reasonably happy with my choice, but since I finished the book the word enterprise has taken on connotations which don't quite fit my usage.

One problem that's emerged since the book is that "enterprise" now usually means a large, well-established company. People think of G.E. or Siemens rather than Facebook, Etsy, or a company of a hundred people producing custom T-shirts. But according to my definition above, even small start-ups rely on software that I would call an enterprise application. So even though the Ruby on Rails community has ended up using enterprise as an insult, I would call Ruby on Rails a framework for building enterprise applications and BaseCamp a classic example of an enterprise application. (Just don't tell DHH I said so or he'll turn me into a hood ornament.)

These connotations around "enterprise" have made me muse about whether we need a different term. When I was writing P of EAA my working title was "Information Systems Architecture", but we felt that "information systems" had its own undesirable connotations of elder technologies. I guess I could go really retro and use "data processing", but on the whole "enterprise application" still seems a better term than anything else I could come up with.