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 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.