An Overview of the Simplified Application Framework - The Cryptography Service
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SAF.Cryptography provides the data encryption and decryption service for the application. Whether it is the password or data that needs to be transmitted over the network, application developers often need to encrypt certain sensitive data within the application. SAF.Cryptography offers a simple tool developers can use to achieve such goals without extensive study of security-related technologies
SAF.Cryptography uses .NET Cryptography, Web Service Enhancement, and .NET remoting. You will learn about it in Chapter 12.
The Transaction Service SAF.Transaction provides a flexible way for developers to make an application transactional. Distributed transactions are supported through COM+ components in .NET. However, it is difficult to implement transactions across multiple method calls without rearranging the flow of the method calls and creating an excessive number of COM+ components. SAF.Transaction makes transaction support across multiple method calls easier and keeps the number of COM+ components down regardless of the number of transactions that need to be supported within the application.
SAF.Transaction is implemented using COM+ in .NET. We will look at the SAF.Transaction service in depth as well as the ServicedComponent class and other COM+ features in the .NET framework in Chapter 13.
SAF B2B Domain-Specific Components I will introduce the last two framework components in the last two chapters of this book. The business requirement for this B2B application is very simple. I want to create an application that can accept an incoming document from a business partner over the Internet, and then apply several services to it to prepare it for internal business processes, some of which are data decryption, document schema transformation, and document logging. Then the document will be passed to a workflow or a series of business tasks to be processed. After the document has been processed, the B2B application may generate an outgoing document or receipt and send it back to the original sender via various protocols. Figure 3-2 illustrates a high-level process flow for this B2B application.
Figure 3-2. Process flow for the B2B application built on SAF
This typical B2B process diagram consists of three major categories: incoming document process, workflow process, and outgoing document process.
The incoming document process consists of a series of document processing layers that apply a number of services to incoming documents. Some examples of document processing layers are document decryption, document schema transformation, document logging, and services that inject some application-specific data into the document.
The concept of outgoing document process is very similar to that of the incoming document process, except that services are applied to the document in reverse order. However, this certainly doesn’t always have to be the case. Services that apply to the document can be added, removed, or reordered according to the application’s business requirements.
The real “business” tasks such as updating inventory, processing new orders, and updating databases are preformed inside the workflow process. Processing of a business document often touches multiple applications and systems inside an enterprise. Being able to identify the participating applications and link them all together to automate the process of a particular business document is the central task of the workflow process.
Because B2B applications can more or less fit into this model, we can use it as a blueprint to develop some domain-specific framework components for B2B applications that would make B2B applications easier to develop, yet be flexible enough to react to changes in business rules and requirements more gracefully.
SAF has two domain-specific framework components for B2B applications: the DocumentLayer service and Workflow service.
 This chapter is from Developing Application Frameworks in .NET by Xin Chen (Apress, 2004, ISBN: 1590592883). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now.
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