SOA Foundation Architecture
At WebSphere Technical Exchange 2006, Rob High--IBM Distinguished Engineer and SOA Foundation Chief Architect--spoke about IBM's foundation architecture for SOA.
What is a Service?
Flexible business requires felxible IT. Business felxibility is key to business success, and IT needs to keep up. Reusable assets can cut costs by up to 20%. SOA is crutial for becoming an On Demand Business. SOA is not about Web services, J2EE, etc.; it's about aligning IT with business, not for IT purposes, but for business purposes.
SOA is the latest step in an evolution of technologies: mainframe architecture, component oriented architecture (COA), service oriented architecture (SOA). (Gartner says so.)
Some definitions:
- A service is a repeatable business task--e.g. check customer credit; open new account.
- Serivce orientation is a way of integrating your business as linked services and the outcomes that they bring.
- A service oriented architecture (SOA) is an IT architectural style that supports service orientation.
- A composite application is a set of related and integrated services that supports a business process built on an SOA.
Layers of alignment of business and IT:
- Business architecture – Business strategy, CBM (how the business works and/or sees itself)
- Application architecture – Legacy + packaged + remote apps (domain-specific object models, service-oriented business architectures (SOBAs))
- Technical architecture – Middleware/platform + existing IT assets + virtual resources (IBM SWG products, etc.)
An SOA solution cuts across all three layers.
Services act as a bridge between business and IT.
- Business focuses on business process flows.
- They implement their activities as services.
- The services implement their functionality using existing and new IT components.
SOA modeling elements – An SOA requires the identification, specification, and realization of the three fundemental building blocks of the service computing paradigm. Can be discovered and modeled via SOMA (service oriented modeling architecture.
The SOA solution stack:
- Consumers
- Business Processes
- Services
- Service Components
- Operational Systems
Aspects of what a service is:
- Business analysis
- Business design
- Service design
- Implementation
Business driven development – An iterative, business-focused development process. Model, assemble, deploy, and manage.
SOA Reference Model models all functionality in an application as services: interaction, process, information, partner, business apps, and access. All connected by an ESB, all supported by infrastructure, deployment, management, etc.
Three keys sources of services for SOA:
- Service-enable existing assets
- Consume external services
- Create new services from scratch
IBM Product Set
IBM (esp. WebSphere) has products to support all parts of the SOA reference model. Other vendors do as well, the ref model isn't vendor specific, and products can be mixed and matched somewhat. But IBM (currently) has the most complete product set, both bredth and depth:
- Development services
- WebSphere Integration Developer
- Rational Application Developer
- Rational Software Architect
- Business inovation and optimization services
- WebSphere Business Modeler
- WebSphere Business Monitor
- ESB
- WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
- DataPower
- WebSphere ESB
- WebSphere Message Broker
- WebSphere Transformation Extender
- Interaction services
- WebSphere Portal
- Lotus Workplace Server
- Lotus Expediter
- Process services
- Information services
- WebSphere Information Server
- WebSphere Customer Center
- DB2 Data Warehouse
- Partner services
- WebSphere Partner Gateway
- Business application services
- WebSphere Application Server
- Access services
- Infrastructure services
- WAS Network Deployment
- WebSphere Extended Deployment
- Management services
- Tivoli Composite Application Manager
- Tivoli Identiry Manager
- Tivoli Federated Identiry Manager
- Tivoli Access Manager
WebSphere Application Server 6.1
- Enhanced security capabilities
- Communication standards (SIP, WS-*, JMS; WS Business Activity, WS Notification)
- Management tools (Installation Factory, IBM Support Assistant)
WAS 6.1 Feature Pack for Web Services
- Asynchronous, reliable Web services
- Standards-based programming model
- JAX-WS 2.0
- JAXB 2.0
- SAAJ 1.3
- StAX 1.0
- Annotation-based model for providers and clients
- Simplified manageme of Web services
WAS 6.1 Feature Pack for SOA
- Implements standardized SCA and SDO (in WAS, not WPS)
- Service Component Architecture
- Service Data Objects
WAS Community Edition
And with that, Rob took questions.
