 | Level: Advanced Contributors: IBM 28 Mar 2007 In this series of whitepapers we will provide a comparison of Web services
technologies, followed by a study of different Web services types for integration
specific problems, provided both by IBM WebSphere SOA Edition and IBM Rational
Application Developer. Finally we will outline an SOA case study, which will use Web
service technology for Information Services, and at the same time, indicate that
Information Services are only components in an overall SOA architecture.
Information Services is one of the core parts of the IBM SOA Reference Architecture,
and are required for managing and accessing all forms of information in a Service
Oriented Architecture. Thereby, Information Services emphasize on separating the
physical implementation or location of the information from the processes and
application that request the information. The idea behind Information Services is to provide and access information through
industry standards which then allows building business processes without the
requirement to understand data source specific interfaces or the semantic and
complexity of the functionality that these services deliver. By definition, there is no particular technology in which Information Services have
to be developed as long as four main principles are involved:
- Interoperability
- Modularity
- Reusability
- Componentization
However, Web service technology takes on an increasing significance as the interface
in which Information Services are provided. But Information Services have specific
characteristics for messages sizes, invocation pattern and service runtime.
Therefore, it is necessary to understand these technologies to make the right choice
for SOA implementation. In this series of whitepapers we will provide a comparison of Web services
technologies, followed by a study of different Web services types for integration
specific problems, provided both by IBM WebSphere SOA Edition and IBM Rational
Application Developer. Finally we will outline an SOA case study, which will use Web
service technology for Information Services, and at the same time, indicate that
Information Services are only components in an overall SOA architecture. Generally, Information Services comprises the complete spectrum of Information
Management functionality. However, for this series we have narrowed the focus to
Information Integration Services, which is a specific type of service that provides
real-time, integrated access to business information regardless of data location or
format.
Resources
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