Mustufa Husain MIS 589 Prof.

Kenneth Chipps 09/11/2013

I. Deals-R-Us Brokers (Part 1)

Fred Jones, a distant relative of yours and president of Deals-R-Us Brokers (DRUB), has come to you for advice. DRUB is a small brokerage house that enables its clients to buy and sell stocks over the Internet, as well as place traditional orders by phone or fax. DRUB has just decided to offer a set of stock analysis tools that will help its clients more easily pick winning stocks, or so Fred tells you. Freds information systems department has presented him with two alternatives for developing the new tools. The first alternative will have a special tool developed in C++ that clients will download onto their computers to run. The tool will communicate with the DRUB server to select data to analyze. The second alternative will have the C++ program running on the server, the client will use his or her browser to interact with the server.

a. Classify the two alternatives in terms of what type of application architecture they use. b. Outline the pros and cons of the two alternatives and make a recommendation to Fred about which is better.

a. .The first alternative will have a special tool developed in C++ that clients will download

onto their computers to run. The tool will communicate with the DRUB server to select data to analyze. The application architecture used for this alternative would be the presentation logic as this logic would be useful for the client to be able to receive information from the tool and accepts the commands they run on the tool. The second alternative will have the C++ program running on the server, the client will use his or her browser to interact with the server. The application architecture used for this alternative would be the data access logic as it would require processing to access the data, typically using SQL queries in the background. b. The pro for the first alternative to develop a tool using C++ program is that it would be very fast in processing and communicating with the DRUB server as it would analyze the data real fast, but the con for that is that to have the client download the tool on their computer would require some training time and expense as not all clients are good in installing softwares. The pro for the second alternative to to have the C++ program

running on the server and having the client use his or her browser is very efficient in the sense that it doesnt require any installation on the client side and any updates done on the C++ program would be done once on the server and all the client has to do is interact with the server to run the program, but the downside to that is whenever there is maintenance on the server or the server is down none of the clients can interact with the program. My recommendation to Fred would be to use the first alternative as it is lot easier to train the client in installing the C++ program on their computer or having their IT helpdesk do a system push to all the client computers instead of dealing with second option and have downtime whenever the server is down due to hardware issue or any maintenance on it.