B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

232 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
As an example, an employee system maintained by the HR department
would track all aspects of an employee. There could be an Employee
object which represents an actual employee. The Employee object could
contain the following private data (attributes):
• Name
• Social Security No.
• Start Date
• End Date
• Level
• Salary
These attributes would be persisted in a database. The Employee
object would also have a set of private methods for manipulating or
validating the private data. These methods usually contain logic internal
to the object:
• validateSSNO
• checkSalaryRangeO
Finally, the object has a set of public methods used for accessing the
private data. These methods usually consist of a series of get and set
functions:
• getNameO
• setName()
• getS alary ()
• setSalary()
Distributed object technology is very well suited for heterogeneous
systems and architectures which exist in most organizations. Distributed
objects encapsulate the business logic and data within objects, allowing
them to be located anywhere within a distributed system. Objects can be
linked together in a plug-and-play manner to interoperate across networks.
Distributed object technology allows valuable legacy systems to be
'wrapped' and appear to the developer to be objects. Once wrapped, the
legacy code can participate in a distributed object environment. Object
wrapping allows businesses to leverage existing legacy code while
migrating to a new enterprise architecture.