Application Architecture
Sadia Haleem
Professor Hofkin
CIS 210
May 24, 2018
Strayer University
Application Architecture
Payroll Application Architecture
In most cases, organization prefers to outsource payment services rather than employing personnel to manage payments and payroll activities via bookkeeping activities. The main reason for this is because; this kind of choice has been identified as a way to allow the organization to save money which could have been used to pay these kinds of employees (Erl et al., 2017). Due to technological changes, payroll software and applications are now considered more preferable than any other previous method that was used and preferred and the main reason for this is because an organization can easily acquire a payroll software which will automatically help the company for the rest of the coming years. The main aim of this article is to outline the architectural type that can be utilized in coming up with an effective payroll software for a given organization with a number of various branches and a large number of employees.
The Type of Architecture that the Software will Use and the Reason
The architecture of software greatly determines how that software will behave. Its main focus is on the interaction between the user and the software itself. The main purpose of application/software architecture is to ensure that all the necessary requirements which include both technical and operational that are needed are all met when the software is completely implemented and installed. In addition to this, the architecture serves as a way to optimize various factors which include such things as performance, manageability, and security. An architecture which is appropriate helps to ensure such things as high maintainability, quality, and success of the entire software.
Service-oriented kind of architecture is usually appropriate to be used in the development of payroll software (Erl et al., 2017). The logic behind the software as well as its functions is kind of modularized which makes it easy to present services to the end users.
At first, the payroll software involves the direct entry of employee’s time sheet through the hardware machine. Thereafter the payroll software performs calculations for the working hours of each and every employer as shown in the time sheet which will then be multiplied by the direct working rate hours in order to come up with the final gross earnings of each and every employee. The payroll software then subtracts the necessary tax and thereafter is when the final data is shown to the end user. The calculations performed by the software are complicated and for this reason, they are not shown to the end user but the final solution is easily shown to the end user in a language that can easily be understood by the users. The final information can be transmitted through the internet for the employees or the end user to view or which it is important that each and every employee if give his or her own login credential in order to access the service offered by this application which will definitely boost the concept of privacy in an organization. For this reason, service-oriented architecture is the best method or alternative because it enables the end users to access services regardless of whether they are good at programming or not.
Types of Technology That Will Be Utilized In This Architecture and the Intentions of Each of Them
The first kind of technology that is required is the hardware kind of technology which includes such things as personal computers, workstations, and mobile devices that will help in easy access of the services and also activities such as data entry to the software. The hardware equipment will also help in transmitting the information to the internet for the rest of the employees to also access the information (Hosono et al., 2017). The second technology that is needed as a router or a switch that will enable the organization to easily access the internet and the reason for this is because if it is lacking then the organization will not be able to send information concerning payroll from the main data center to the other branches.
The other important technology that will be required is the availability and use of the web services. Three major components of the web services are important in this kind of architectural design. This includes web services description language which is a system computer language that is based on the XML protocol and it will definitely be used in services description and also being able to access this services. The second important component is the simple object access protocol which is a communication protocol that will be utilized as the transmission medium for the transmission of information between the end users and the service providers. This kind of protocol work effectively through the internet and for this reason, it can be used on various platforms and thus allowing communication to take place between different kinds of applications. The final component is the universal description, discovery, and integration which are very important for activities such as the registry of the distributed web services. In this particular software, it will be used for looking, searching, identification and registry of services.
The final technology that will be used in this architecture is the platform for computing purposes which will determine the actual environment where the payroll software will function effectively. Different kinds f platforms can be utilized which greatly depends on the kind of functionality that the software is expected to perform (Hosono et al., 2017). The service-oriented architecture utilizes the J2EE platform and the .Net platform but it is not restricted to this alone. The J2EE platform is the most preferable platform and the main reason for this is because it enables the user to effectively be involved in the entire development lifecycle thus enable the best architecture to be obtained at the end. It also provides better performance and reliability in terms of the service-oriented based application.
Graphical Representation of the Architecture
Ethical Issues That Could Arise
Ethical issues usually arise from the fact that a lot of private and confidential data/information concerning employees will be presented to other third party participants which will lead to a violation of the employee privacy (Zhang et al., 2017). In regards to this, the first identified unethical issues are the disclosure of the information of the employees. The new payroll software may also expose the organization to legal problems. A good example of this is where the system may not be able to account and identify the extra time that is performed by the employees and thus leading to issues with the law.
References
Erl, T., Merson, P., & Stoffers, R. (2017). Service-Oriented Architecture: Analysis and Design for Services and Microservices. Prentice Hall.
Hosono, S., Kimita, K., Akasaka, F., Tatsunori, H. A. R. A., Shimomura, Y., & Arai, T. (2017). U.S. Patent No. 9,626,156. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Zhang, Y., Neelakantan, A., Kumar, N., Park, C., Haftka, R. T., Kim, N. H., & Lam, H. (2017, November). Multi-fidelity Surrogate Modeling for Application/Architecture Co-design. In International Workshop on Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High-Performance Computer Systems (pp. 179-196). Springer, Cham.