About this series

This series describes the functionalities of IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric (WBSF) with a sample business scenario. It shows why WBSF is necessary in resolving business problems and is composed of 4 parts:

• Part 1: Overview of WebSphere Business Services Fabric V 6.1
• Part 2: Scenario Introduction, Problem Statement, and Business Analysis
• Part 3: Design and Implementation
• Part 4: Service Monitoring using Performance Manager

The first article in this series, Part 1: Overview of WebSphere Business Services Fabric v6.1, provides an overview of WBSF 6.1 and will focus on the WBSF development model and what’s new in WBSF v6.1.

Business services and composite business services

A business service is a business function whose execution can be adapted at runtime based on business policy and user context. The key characteristics of a business service are that it is:

• Designed at the business level to represent a discrete business function (e.g. check credit, open account)
• Derived from disparate IT resources (e.g. legacy systems, custom applications, ISV systems, third party services)
• Built using Web service and industry standards (e.g. WS-I, ACORD, HIPAA, HL7)
• Provisioned through multiple communication channels (e.g. Web, B2B, IVR)
• Can be combined to create loosely coupled applications and processes
• Can provide flexible, adaptable behavior based on business policy and user context

Composite Business Services (CBS) are a composition of related business services that are instantiated incrementally to support a business solution. Some of the key characteristics of composite business services include:

• Composed of one or more business services that encapsulate
  • “What”, i.e. IT resources or capabilities
  • “Who”, i.e. Subscribers or role-based users
  • “How”, i.e. Business processes, contracts, and delivery methods
• Delivers adaptive and personalized behavior
• Provides consistent, multi-modal access to services
• Enables a lower risk, incremental deployment approach
• Consists of loosely coupled assets that are managed and governed across their lifecycle

Figure 1 shows how CBS works in the IBM SOA solution stack and how these components fit into it.

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WBSF Introduction

WBSF provides an end-to-end platform for the rapid assembly, delivery, and governance of industry focused composite business services based on an SOA foundation. WBSF adds an industry-specific, semantically-aware layer to the IBM SOA foundation to enable dynamic business service personalization and delivery based on business context. WBSF brings many benefits to a variety of business solutions and it contains:

• Flexibility to change processes and service execution behavior across multiple business processes and disparate IT systems.
• Policy-driven business services to provide customized business functionality based on changing business contexts.
• Faster process change and easier ongoing maintenance with business-level policies stored in a centralized location.

WBSF components

WBSF consists of three parts: the Business Services Foundation Pack, the Business Services Tool Pack, and several industry content packs. These parts work together to simplify the business, technology, security, governance and process interoperability issues associated with business services in an SOA. Figure 2 shows the WBSF product and solution architecture:

Let’s break down these into their component parts:

Business Services Foundation Pack: The Business Services Foundation Pack provides the integrated run-time and management environment for CBS deployment.

Business Services Tool Pack : The Business Services Tool Pack provides the integrated design and assembly environment for CBS development.

Industry Content Packs: In order to help speed time to market for new industry SOA solutions, Business Services Fabric provides optional Industry Content Packs (ICPs). Currently available are packs for the Healthcare, Insurance, Banking and Telecommunications industries.

WBSF Development model

WBSF not only provides the functionality for service dynamic assembler, but it also provides a development model that includes elements to develop a service, publish a service, and govern a service. Figure 3 shows the WBSF development model.

In the WBSF development model, there are six key activities:

1. Establish Fabric Project: IT administrators create service metadata in Business Services Governance Manager and published it to the Business Services Repository.
2. Extend Ontology: IT Architects use Fabric Model Extension Tools to define and publish WebSphere Business Services Fabric extensions (ontologies) based on business service requirements.
3. Model and Assemble CBS: IT Developers use Fabric Composition Studio to create business services metadata in WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) Business Services Perspective, and to develop and assemble business services in WID Business Integration Perspective.
4. Publish CBS metadata: IT developers publish business services metadata to the Business Services Repository, and IT administrators review the change list.
5. Deploy and test: IT developers fetch approved business services metadata from the Business Services Repository, deploy business services to WPS and test it.
6. Service monitoring: IT Analysts subscribe the business services in Business Services Subscriber Manager and analyze the execution records through Business Services Performance Manager.

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What’s new in WBSF v6.1

When we compare versions 6.0.2 vs. 6.1 of WSBF, we find that 6.1 offers enhanced consumability and ease of use, and improved concurrency with other WebSphere BPM software to support faster process change, easier maintenance, and increased levels of service reuse.

In detail, WBSF v6.1 provides many new features and capabilities, including:

1. Enhanced business-level policy management focusing on increased expressiveness of policies, improved tooling for creating and managing policies, and better simulation of policies.
2. Simplified administration and interoperability with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
3. Greater concurrency with other WebSphere BPM software.
4. Better tooling for consumption of the assets in industry content packs.
5. Additional platform support for wider deployment options including new operating systems and new databases
6. Support for Russian language
7. (For z/OS only) System Modification Program/Extended (SMP/E)-based installer for the z/OS platform to simplify installation

Some of the new features will be mentioned and highlighted in the Part 3 of this series.

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Summary

In part 1 of this series you learned some background and a brief overview of what IBM WebSphere Business Service Fabric v 6.1 is, and what their development model looks like. The next part will introduce a typical business scenario with a typical business problem, after performing the business analysis, it will shows why WBSF can provide a solution to fix this problem.

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Downloads

Information about download methods

Resources

• Participate in the discussion forum.
  
  
• Learn more about IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric which is used for adapting, rapidly responding to change with dynamic, SOA-based business processes.
  
  
• Check out the IBM WebSphere Business Process Management Version 6.0 information center where you can find all of the information that you need to install, maintain, and use IBM WebSphere Business Process Management software.
  
  
• IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal, Part 1: Developing adaptive composite business services using WebSphere Business Services Fabric, Part 1 Introducing IBM's new platform for business service modeling, assembly, and deployment
  
  
• IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal: Developing adaptive composite business services using WebSphere Business Services Fabric, Part 2: Analyzing the business requirements
  
  
• Developing adaptive composite business services using WebSphere Business Services Fabric: Part 3: CBS modeling, ontology editing, and policy simulation
  
  
• Developing adaptive composite business services using WebSphere Business Services Fabric: Part 4: Service assembly with the Dynamic Assembler SCA component
  
  

About the authors

Comments (Undergoing maintenance)

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Table of contents

• About this series
• Business services and composite business services
• WBSF Introduction
• What’s new in WBSF v6.1
• Summary
• Downloads
• Resources
• About the authors
• Comments

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