This document describes the architecture of the coefficient platform. NOTE: These documents have not been updated since the modules have been made to deploy under both JBoss and Tomcat.
Coefficient is a project based collaboration and facilitation platform. It is similar to the sourceForge project in behavior. It builds upon sourceForge in that it is a J2EE enterprise level solution to the problem. It also has a coherent architecture so that it becomes easy to extend and maintain.
In addition to architectural differences this project differs from sourceForge in one key way. This system allows projects to be associated with workflows. Workflows are powerful definitions that allow a domain expert to translate their knowledge into a set of pre-defined states and actions that will then allow any number of projects to benefit from this knowledge by being guided through the construction of the domain expert.
The system is of a modular design. Modules of the system are represented by Stateless Session Beans, persistent data objects, and view components. The system has two obvious extension points, workflows and modules. A workflow is represented by an XML document and can be uploaded into the system via management utilities. A module can exist as a separate deployable entity and we have provided build mechanisms so that the creator only need provide business logic and presentation logic.
