III.9 Architecture Decisions
Following are the architectural decisions thaat are considered for MaMa:
- No commercial CRM tool:
Do not use any of the commercial CRM tools as a foundation for MaMa. The main reason for this was the incredible amount of flexibility that was required to quickly set up campaigns. This decision proved to be correct, as several early competitors (who operated on slightly customized standard CRM tools) failed to enter the market MaMa operated in.
- JBoss Drools for rule processing:
Use JBoss Drools as a rule processing engine. We evaluated Python (Jython) as an alternative, but that proved to be incredibly slow for our kind of processing.
- No ETL tool for data import:
Do not use an ETL tool for importing data. The contractor, InDAC, refused to consider the license fee of commercial ETL tools. Therefore, the development team had no chance to even evaluate these tools as data import solutions.
