Why are business objects relevant to front office applications?
Business objects make enormous sense in the development of front office systems. Consider the distinguishing traits listed above: • User sites require large amounts of customization, even though the patterns of usage from site to site is very similar. Business objects are exactly the right abstraction to capture extensive user customization. • The most dominant pattern in these systems is “tracking things.” Other important patterns include “ask for permission”, “hierarchy of parts”, and “master-detail.” Embedding these patterns in root business objects provides a clean way to support these behaviors. • Applications are used in a browsing mode rather than a transaction mode. Browsing relationships are straightforwardly implemented in a business object framework by adjusting pre-fetch and caching algorithms to reflect expected user moves between related business objects. • Rapidly changing and strongly driven by customer needs. The business objects provide the right level of abstraction
