The CORA Model

Introduction

This blog post is the first in a serie of two describing the findings and lessons learned of applying the CORA model in a software development project. This project is based on a demo scenario where CORA is used as a model to support architecting software.

In this blog post the post the demo scenario and it’s background is described. Also, the actual mapping of components in the demo scenario onto the CORA model is shown. In the second blog post we present the findings and lessons learned from this project. Also  CORA’s benefits and our next steps in the project are outlined.

During the last two years or so, Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA for short [1]) has become more and more common as an alternative for other application styles such as n-tier and SOA. In particular, the rise of so called “Web 2.0” applications on the Internet contributed greatly to the popularity of ROA as an implementation of the REST architecture, in particular due to it’s simplicity and it’s light-weight.

We became curious: what would ROA do in an SAP environment? Could ROA be an alternative for SOA? We already knew others were working on communicating with SAP through REST, but we wanted to take it one step further: we wanted to see whether we could make ROA work in a real life application that could really provide value to users!

The demo scenario which would make us rich

After a couple of  brainstormsessions we came up with a brilliant idea: a mobile scenario where consumers would be able to generate recipes and shopping lists based on food allergies.

Recipes typically describe lists of ingredients as well as instructions on preparation. Using traditional recipes for humans with food allergies is difficult because somebody might be a might be allergic to specific ingredients. Let’s look at an example to clarify this.

A recipe for a rice dish requires Green Curry paste. So the recipe will list as one of the ingredients “Green Curry paste”. Imagine someone allergic to Dairy products. Whether this person can use this recipe is dependent on whether Green Curry pastes exist without any dairy ingredients. These might exist, but finding them in a supermarket can be quite taxing. For someone with a food allergy it would be much easier to simply have a recipe that states the use of specific products (i.e. “Asia’s Finest Green Curry”) which do not contain the person’s allergants. Even better would be if only recipes are generated based on allergy as well as the stock available in a specific supermarket, as not every brand or product is available in any supermarket.

So this was our dream: to develop an mobile App that could translate recipe’s into lists of actual products, based on the information about stock available in the consumers supermarket of choice.  This App should developed for the Apple iPhone, interfacing with an SAP back-end through REST.

Next we started designing and developing the iPhone App, the REST interface and connection with SAP. After a while we came across many more findings and design choices than we had imagined, so came to the conclusion we needed an architecture reference model to help us making the correct steps. This was the moment we introduced the CORA model in out project, which is presented in the next section.

Mapping our scenario to CORA