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A WEB-BASED TIME BOOKING FRAMEWORK
Liping Zhao, Abdelgadir Ibrahim
Department of Computation, UMIST, Manchester, U.K.
Keywords: Framework, pattern, product family, web-based application
Abstract:
A framework can be viewed as a design schema from which application systems derive.
Application systems of a framework are called instantiations of the framework and collectively
form a product family. The article describes the development of a web-based time booking
framework. The development consists of three main stages: meta level design, framework level
design and application instantiation. The article illustrates, through the development of a car
hiring application system, that once the framework is in place, instantiating an application system
only requires a few simple steps.
1 INTRODUCTION
Many business and service providers require that
assets, whether they are tangible such as conference
rooms or intangible ones such as doctor
appointments, be booked for a particular date and
time prior to their use in order to prevent overload
and undesirable time clashes. For the purpose of this
article a booking system is defined as a set of
mechanisms and procedures together with the
supporting tools, whether in paper or electronic
form, that enable a business to provide its customers
with a specific service at a pre-agreed date and time.
In this article, the terms asset and service are used
interchangeably to refer to the booked entity, and the
same applies to business and service provider.
The booking procedure may vary from one
busi
ness to another and may also vary according to
the characteristics of the customer or the booked
asset. Some business for example only accepts
bookings from registered customers e.g. a health
care surgery. Others may impose some restrictions
on the assets that a customer is allowed to book. A
car hiring company, for example, may employ a
policy that prevent customers with certain number of
license penalty points from hiring cars of a certain
value. Yet other business may demand that bookings
be made at least a specific number of days in
advance for managerial purposes. These collectively
are termed business rules and they provide the
operational behaviour of the booking system.
Although the business rules for time booking
m
ay vary from one application to another, most time
booking applications share, albeit possible small
variations, a common set of procedures for asset
booking. These involve a customer contacting a
service provider and requesting a specific service.
Based on the service request, the provider then
presents the customer with a list of possible times at
which the service can be offered. Once the customer
has selected the desired time, the provider then
confirms the agreed time either verbally or in written
form. Figure 1 illustrates this common booking
process.
The identification of the common booking
pr
ocess in Figure 1 suggests that it make sense to
develop a time booking framework for different
booking applications. Developers utilising this
framework can then extend this common
functionality as appropriate for their specific
application requirements.
Framework development is more difficult and
expe
nsive than normal application development
(Durham, Johnson, 1996). In order to be useful, a
framework must be simple and easy for a developer
to understand and learn while at the same time be
functionally rich so that it can be used quickly and
easily without much effort by developers.
Furthermore, a framework must be sufficiently
flexible so that they can be customised for the
individual application requirements. Hence a
framework should only be developed in situations
where applications share a common set of
requirements. Application systems of a framework
are called instantiations of the framework and
collectively, they are referred to as a product family
(Parnas, 1976). All the members in a product family
439
Zhao L. and Ibrahim A. (2004).
A WEB-BASED TIME BOOKING FRAMEWORK.
In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 439-442
DOI: 10.5220/0002646404390442
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