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Enhydra design patterns for ASPs: improve custom branding while reducing development costs. (Case Study).

Article Excerpt
Currently Enhydra is receiving lots of attention for its capabilities as a server for wireless applications, but application service providers (ASPs) can use it to improve their ability to provide custom branding while at the same time reducing development costs. This article outlines some of the design patterns we used with Enhydra to create a set of applications that support thousands of very different looks from a single code base.

Even more impressive is the potential for evolution. Instead of using file-based development, as we did back in the days of C programming, we can begin to apply object-oriented concepts, like classification and abstraction, to HTML development. In C programming we divided up our code into fries that corresponded to the coarse-grained concepts in the software we created. That's pretty much how Web developers divide up their HTML. With object orientation we can divide our program into classifications (classes), and classes are wonderful things because, unlike files, they can have complex relationships to other classes (association, inheritance, aggregations, etc ...). Using XMLC and some well-known design patterns, you can apply OO principles to Web development, including inheritance.

The Requirement

Our client is an ASP for a group of about 30 commercial financial institutions. Each of which uses the products internally and resells them to thousands of retail financial institutions. The unique look each of these institutions has is a valuable commodity, and having a look and feel that consistently matches their branding is an absolute requirement.

Developing server applications that can support thousands of different looks based on a user's login is difficult. Before Enhydra, we were limited to the items available in Cascading Style Sheets (i.e., colors and fonts) and perhaps a different logo in the corner. Or we would end up with tons of JSP pages that required lots of maintenance and made making wholesale application changes very expensive.

The Bridge Pattern

The first pattern we used is the Bridge pattern (see Figure...

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