A pattern language for designing e-business architecture

The pattern language for e-business provides a holistic support for developing software architectures for the e-business domain. The pattern language contains four related pattern categories: Business Patterns, Integration Patterns, Application Patterns, and Runtime Patterns. These pattern categories organise an e-business architecture into three layers—business interaction, application infrastructure and middleware infrastructure—and provide reusable design solutions to these layers in a top–down decomposition fashion. Business and Integration Patterns partition the business interaction layer into a set of subsystems; Application Patterns provide a high-level application infrastructure for these subsystems and separate business abstractions from their software solutions; Runtime Patterns then define a middleware infrastructure for the subsystems and shield design solutions from their implementations. The paper describes, demonstrates and evaluates this pattern language.