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Understanding SOA, ESB and Web Services

Understanding SOA, ESB and Web Services

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural approach to development that turns traditional techniques upside down. SOA encourages organizations to think in terms of actual business services and the associated data, rather than low level technology details. Rather than developing applications from the ground up, SOA frees organizations to start with high level business definitions for data, interfaces, documents, and processes. SOA then maps these high level service definitions onto new or existing infrastructure, regardless of the details, location, or programming language in which systems were written.

Business Agility: The Driving Force for Service-Oriented Architecture

Organizations in all sectors of business and government are pursuing Service Oriented Architecture initiatives in response to their need for increased business agility. Over the past decades, organizations have built, purchased, and customized infrastructure and business applications to the point that their challenge is no longer in automating a particular point business function, but in accessing data and functionality in these systems more efficiently, and combining functionality from multiple systems to more closely represent their true, composite, business processes. Implementation of a Service-Oriented Architecture enables companies to better leverage their existing technology assets, gain increased transparency into their data and processes in real-time, synchronize redundant systems, and map new and existing business processes onto their myriad systems to seamlessly align their IT infrastructure with their business needs.

SOA: The Architectural Approach

SOA refers to defining services or interfaces - usually coarse grained business services, such as "issue a purchase order", for example - as reusable pieces of software that can be invoked by other applications and combined in a loosely coupled manner to model complete business processes. The concept of SOA is not new. In fact, there have been many enabling technologies for building SOA over the years, including CORBA, DCOM, and even MQSeries. These technologies provided advancements at the time, but were limiting in a number of ways. So why all the fuss over Web services as an enabler for SOA?

Download Principles of SOA Design whitepaper.

Web services: The Enabling Technology for SOA

"Web services" describes a standardized way of constructing and integrating applications using open standards over an Internet backbone. What makes the application of Web services as an enabling technology for SOA so powerful is that for the first time we have an underlying mechanism that uses well defined, standardized interfaces, effectively freeing the calling program from the need to deal with the intricacies of the underlying applications. Web services are self-describing, use widely accepted standards, and are accessible over a wide variety of transports, including (and especially) HTTP.

An exciting by-product of the prevalence of Web services is that new standards are being rapidly developed and adopted to describe functionality that has previously been available only through proprietary protocols. As an example, proprietary Business Process Modeling (BPM) products, which require specialized developer skill-sets and force vendor lock-in, have been commercially available for years. Recently though, all of the major software vendors have converged around the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL4WS) standard put forth by the OASIS standards committee, providing a welcome, Web services standards-based alternative for creating sophisticated business processes (including long running, asynchronous processes).

Similarly, the WS-ReliableMessaging standard provides guaranteed message delivery through the use of Web services and XML over HTTP, enabling standards-based message delivery inside and across the firewall, providing a complement or even a replacement to JMS. Development and widespread adoption of additional standards are providing Web services based alternatives to the variety of proprietary functionality on the market, providing lower cost, simpler ways to harness your IT assets, without requiring vendor lock-in or proprietary developer skill-sets. As one leading industry analyst recently wrote, "the use of the Web services stack as a cheaper, simpler EAI alternative is a no-brainer."

Read more on Web services.

Enterprise Service Bus: The Product Implementation

The Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB, is a new product category at the intersection of SOA, application integration, and business process modeling. The ESB promotes a fast, straightforward way to build a Service-Oriented Architecture, and provides a standards-based, simpler approach to application integration. The Enterprise Service Bus is an infrastructure-agnostic suite of products that provide Web service enablement, processing, and monitoring capabilities, graphical data mapping and transformation, routing, and orchestration capabilities that leverage your existing infrastructure of application servers, transports, applications, and data. Use of an ESB typically results in an order of magnitude better ROI than traditional integration approaches.

To learn more about Cape Clear ESB, download the ESB whitepaper.

If you are interested in finding out more about ESB and SOA, see:

posted on 2007-03-21 15:50 advincenting 阅读(257) 评论(0)  编辑  收藏


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