In general, software application is designed to meet an organizational need in reality mode. As the business model is quite common in a similar industry, it obviously expects the software application to build with the common architecture to satisfy the business requirements of an enterprise. As a result, Application Architecture is built in a generic way to create the business system, which is required to meet the specific requirements of the business.
By definition, Application Architecture specifies the leveraging technologies. Technologies are easily used to implement information systems, such as data, processes, and interfaces. On top of that, Application Architecture describes the details of the internal components and the way they interact to build the complete information system.
In terms of the engineering principle, Application Architecture exhibits the execution steps and methods in the model of the system blueprint into the reality of the leveraging enterprise.
Applications are generally categorized in the following listed types, along with their related characteristics. The categorization is based on the nature of the business process:
| S.No. | Application processing type | Characteristics | Sample |
| 1 | Data | It is completely data-centric without explicit user manual intervention |
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| 2 | Transaction | On the receipt of user requests, system-centric data is updated with the received information in a system database |
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| 3 | Event | This system is based on the receipt of the interested events from the system environment; it is not necessary to process non-interested data points |
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| 4 | Language | Users' interventions are specified in a formal language to be processed by the underlying system. It is mostly involved in system programming |
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Irrespective of the preceding types of application, Application Architecture is designed into the logical groupings of the software components. These logical layers help you differentiate between the different kinds of tasks performed by the components. In turn, the system is easier to support the design principle of reusability across the platform.
Each layer can be implemented as a large scale component running on a separate server. It is the most commonly used web-based architectural model in the industry. As a common practice, six layers are designed in the Application Architecture of the industry, which are as follows:
- End User Layer: This is an individual who uses the product after it is fully developed and marketed. This layer is around the usage pattern of the end user. As a result of rapid technology growth in recent times, the End User Layer is essential to build for desktop, web, mobile, pad, and so on.
- Presentation Layer: This contains the end user oriented functionality responsible for managing user interaction with the core system. In general, it consists of components that provide a common bridge between the end user and core business logic encapsulated in the business layer. Presentation Layer consists of UI components to render the user output and UI processor for local processing.
- Server Layer: This implements the core functionality of the target system by encapsulating the relevant business logic. In modern design, this layer consists of components, some of which may expose service interfaces that other callers can use. It is termed as the heart of the system.
- Access Layer: This layer is a bridge between the core business/server layer and the persisted store layer. It is designed using the best access pattern and practices of the enterprise architecture. It has two key components, namely the Data Access Component (DAC) and Service Gateway (SG). DAC allows programmers to have a uniform and comprehensive way of developing applications that can access almost any data store. The SG component encapsulates the low-level details of communicating with a service by means of service interfaces. Moreover, SG provides an ideal location to provide common features, such as asynchronous invocation, caching, and error handling.
- Persistence Layer: As the application data is persisted in this layer, it provides access to data hosted within the boundaries of the system and data exposed by other networked systems. By design, data is accessed through services in modern Application Architecture.
- External Layer: This layer is designed to expose the functionality of the application as the services to the external customer. API is the popular term in the industry, through which business services are exposed externally to earn the profit by sharing the best services.
In conclusion, Applications Architecture is the art and science of ensuring the suite of enterprise applications to create the composite architecture with the characteristics of scalability, reliability, availability, and manageability.