Application and Application Component

Application - Teminology

What is an application ? There is no general and satisfactory answer to this question. You need define your own abstraction in order to have a high-level view of your landscape.

A pragmatic approach is to decide that an Application is an homogenous set of Application Components seen as one from an external point of view with defined interfaces to other systems. With this definition, an application describes the software used in a company from a functional point of view and that supports the business with their functions and capabilities .

Application - Example

In a bank for example, an Application could be the web banking. Customers use the web banking as their main bank application.

Application Component - Teminology

An application id composed of Application Component. Application Component is as a modular, deployable, software compoenent.

Application Component - Example

In the above web banking example, from DEV & IT-OPS teams perspective, web bankink application is decomposed into in 3 ou 4 different Application Components separately deployable, that together create the web banking application

Mapping with Archimate specification

Application and Application Components can be mapped to Application Component An application is composed of Application Component. This is usually modeled with an Application Structure Viewpoint

Archimate 3.1

• There is no definition of Application
• An application component represents an encapsulation of application functionality aligned to implementation structure, which is modular and replaceable.
• An application component is defined as a modular, deployable, and replaceable part of a software system that encapsulates its behavior and data and exposes these through a set of interfaces.

What’s next ?

NEXT : If you want to continue to dicover the metamodel, see what is an Landscape