After an application is deployed, the costs of operating the application
become an important measure of success. The toolkit offers cost savings
that take effect at and continue beyond deployment. Following are
some of the ways that the toolkit reduces operating costs:
- Preservation of back-end systems
- Deployment of a toolkit-based application does not require changes
in existing business logic or transactions run in back-end systems.
The toolkit uses JCA connectors and invokers to connect
existing back-end systems and the application located on a middle-tier
server.
- Reduced maintenance and operational costs
- The use of the network computing architecture, which is based
on Internet technologies, results in immediate cost savings on client
administration, code distribution, and server management. In addition,
toolkit solutions minimize the code distribution that is required
for incremental changes.
- Operational portability
- If operational conditions require that the application be moved
to another platform, this can be quickly performed since the application
is platform-independent.
- Ease of maintenance
- During operation, it is common to discover that application
changes are needed. The environment and the distributed nature of
the application support easy, quick, and universal application updates
no matter how many application delivery channels and users are affected.
- Adjustments to suit available system resources
- Technology and systems are subject to change; toolkit-based applications
can quickly be adapted to take advantage of more system resources
or compensated for a reduction in resources.
- Reduced workstation requirements
- The distributed architecture of toolkit-based applications reduces
the resources needed to deliver the application to the user. User
workstations need to do little more than support the application presentation
and any directly connected peripherals. Adding workstations is extremely
cost-efficient since the server-based application can be distributed
to any number of client workstations.
- Common functionality across channels
- An application can be designed to provide a common set of functions
across multiple delivery channels. This consistent approach to service
delivery promotes user satisfaction and reduces the training time
needed if the user moves between channels.