WebSphere Information Services Director architecture

The extensible architecture of WebSphere^® Information Services Director makes it possible for you to enable a broad range of IBM^® Information Server tasks as services.

Infrastructure services

WebSphere Information Services Director is deployed on a J2EE-based Service Backbone that provides flexible, distributable and configurable interconnections among the many parts of the architecture. These infrastructure services include:

Logging services: Provide a central place for a user to record service events. Logs go into the common repository with each service provider defining relevant logging categories for that service. Configurations determine which categories of logging messages are actually saved in the repository.
Security services: Support role-based authentication of users, access-control services and encryption appropriate for compliance with many privacy and security regulations.
Load balancing and availability services: Support routing requests to multiple servers to provide optimal loading and a high availability environment that can recover from any individual server failure.

Service catalog

Provides users with the means to search and browse services by category and to view descriptions available to be defined by WebSphere Information Services Director. If you have WebSphere Service Registry Repository installed, WebSphere Information Services Director also provides a direct link to the WebSphere Service Registry Repository.

Information provider handlers

Each service is performed by defining operations performed by an operations provider. WebSphere Information Services Director agents contain handlers to process service requests from the following operations providers:

WebSphere DataStage™: Transforms data of any complexity and delivers it to target applications. WebSphere DataStage provides built-in connectivity for easy access to any source or target system, advanced development tools to define and deploy transformation integration processes and a scalable platform to process massive volumes of data.
WebSphere QualityStage: Prepares data for integration by providing a powerful framework for developing and deploying data matching, standardization, enrichment and survivorship operations, which simplifies the process of integrating similar data from multiple sources.
IBM DB2^® Universal Database: Provides a native interface to IBM’s flagship relational database system for development and deployment of critical enterprise data.
WebSphere Federation Server: The Federation server presents a single virtual view of the data that might exist in many forms: structured and unstructured; mainframe and distributed; public and private. This data might reside in diverse source systems, such as Oracle databases, enterprise applications, Microsoft^® spreadsheets, flat files, the Web, news groups, and more, and be distributed across a variety of operating environments, such as Windows^®, Linux^®, UNIX^®, and z/OS^®.
IBM WebSphere Classic Federation: The Classic Federation server provides SQL access to mainframe databases and files without mainframe programming. By using the key product features, you can read from and write to mainframe data sources by using SQL, map logical relational table structures to existing physical mainframe databases and files, use the Classic Data Architect graphical user interface (GUI) to issue standard SQL commands to the logical tables, use standards-based access with ODBC, JDBC, or CLI interfaces, and take advantage of multi-threading with native drivers for scalable performance.
Oracle: The Oracle server provides an interface to Oracle's relational database system for the development and deployment of critical enterprise data.
IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management (MDM) Server: IBM InfoSphere MDM Server manages master data information about customers, accounts, and products from many enterprise applications (for example, ERP, CRM, and data warehouses) and delivers a single, consistent view of the information. It is a service-oriented business application that is designed to be integrated with all business applications and process management tools during real time or batch processing. This interface allows MDM Web services to be registered with WebSphere Information Services Director.

Service bindings

Service consumers are able to access information services by using multiple technologies for program interoperability (bindings). WebSphere Information Services Director allows the same service to support multiple protocol bindings, all defined within the WSDL file. This improves the utility of services and therefore increases the likelihood of reuse and adoption across the enterprise. WebSphere Information Services Director provides the unique ability to publish the same service by using the following bindings, which include:

SOAP over HTTP (Web services): Any XML Web service–compliant application can invoke an information service as a Web service. These Web services support the generation of “literal document-style” and “SOAP-encoded RPC-style” Web services.
SOAP and Text over JMS: In a message queue environment, WebSphere Information Services Director can automatically generate an asynchronous JMS queue listener (message-driven bean) and route incoming SOAP messages into information services. As an option, it can adapt the output of an information service into a SOAP message that can be posted to one or more JMS queues or topics.
EJB: For Java-centric development, WebSphere Information Services Director can generate a J2EE-compliant EJB (stateless session bean) where each information service is instantiated as a separate synchronous EJB method call.
REST: For distributed hypermedia systems, WebSphere Information Services Director can generate services that use a REST (Representational State Transfer) invocation: HTTP GET (or POST for complex input) for service requests and XML or JSON format for the response.
RSS: By using the RSS binding, WebSphere Information Services Director can expose services as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. RSS is a Web content syndication format that is also used as an effective and simple way to uniquely identify and exchange time-stamped data and associated metadata.

Information service consumers

Information Service consumers are a broad set of custom applications and products that call information services that are created by WebSphere Information Services Director. Although many technologies can interface with WebSphere Information Services Director's bindings, WebSphere Information Services Director offers pre-built plug-ins and interfaces to a number of WebSphere products. These include the following consumers:

WebSphere Process Server: A special interface called WebSphere Process Server applications has been developed to allow users to employ information services as part of orchestrations defined in WebSphere Integration Developer. Once deployed, the information server can be invoked through any of its multiple supported bindings, such as Web Services, EJB, or JMS.
Portlets: Portlets are pluggable user interface components that are managed and displayed in a Web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal page. The WebSphere Portlet Factory speeds IBM WebSphere Portal deployments by automating portlet development for faster time-to-value and enables developers of any skill level to construct, change, deploy, and maintain custom portlets. WebSphere Information Services Director's integration with the Portlet Factory enables users to automatically incorporate information service data into the creation of a portlet that can be deployed in WebSphere Portal Server.
Service Component Architecture (SCA): Provides a client programming model and consistent way of describing components as services available over different protocols. SCA is supported by IBM’s WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) product.