Deals R-Us Brokers

Mini Case 1: - 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. Fred’s 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. (FitzGerald, 2009, p. 68)

A: The two alternatives that have been presented are host-based and clients-based. In the host-based option the user will interact with the server via a web browser. This option leaves all of the work to the server at DRUB. In the client-based option, the user will have to download an application to their computer that will do all the number crunching. It will only pull data that is needed for parsing.

B: With the host-based solution DRUB will be able maintain more stringent configuration control. With a web interface there is less of a chance that the user may reconfigure their application to do something nefarious. Host-based also lowers development costs to a point since there is no need to design, develop, test, and deploy a stand-alone application for the user to download. Another plus is the user would be able to use the service from any...