Summary

Integration and content management are important to enterprises today, and need special mentioning. Since so many new applications are Web based and often use data from various systems, you need to consider them thoroughly.

The importance of designing for scalability cannot be stressed enough. Keep in mind, however, that this does not necessarily mean that performance is the most important thing all the time. In some instances security has to be more important than performance, as this book will show. Unfortunately, security almost always comes with a slight performance penalty; but if you design your applications correctly, you can compensate for this.

In order to successfully design and develop an application or system, all people involved need to have consensus on what to build. By modeling in UML you can accomplish this. For your own good you should use it. If you do not model, there most certainly will come a time when you wish you had. If you are unfortunate, this is when customers question if the system you built actually was the one they asked for.

A great way of ensuring your application maps the users' requirements is by using ORM. With the simplicity of this method, you can have business experts talk about the model in sentences and sample populations. You can then map your ORM model to a database schema.

Our aim with this book is to help you in designing a good, scalable application that will be a success for the development team. So do not wait around anymore. Dive into the book and good luck with your applications.