Dave Shaffer

This article is the second part of a two-part series covering best practices for building Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. The following are the seven key steps for effective SOA adoption: Create a portfolio of services Define connectivity and messaging interfaces Process orchestration, workflow, and rules Rich user interfaces Business activity monitoring Security and management Performance and scalability In the first article, we described why adopting an SOA is valuable but can be difficult. We also looked in detail at the first three of the seven steps outlined above. In this article we'll focus on the final four steps and look at some "worst practices" - common errors in SOA design and how to avoid them. Rich User Interfaces We've seen several generations of UI evolution since the emergence of the Web as an application interface paradigm. Initial... (more)

WSIF & JSR-208

There's a common misconception that Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is useful only if all of your systems are Web services. This article describes how Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) enables BPEL to orchestrate nearly any legacy system as if it were a Web service - without having to explicitly wrap or publish it as one. It also highlights how JSR-208 will standardize this capability in the not-too-distant future. Introduction As Web services begin to take hold as an enterprise integration strategy, BPEL has rapidly become the undisputed standar... (more)

Process-Centric Realization of SOA

Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the right direction to start delivering on this promise. SOAs (service-oriented architectures) promise to enable businesses to align their business processes to customer needs, and optimize them to improve customer responsiveness and drive efficiency. A process-oriented realization of SOAs is necessary to deliver on this promise. The process-oriented model is based on an SOA component model augmented with an underlying formal model in w... (more)

Best Practices for Building SOA Applications

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) facilitates the development of applications as modular business services that can be easily integrated, secured, and administered. Benefits of an SOA approach include more-rapid development, decreased maintenance and change management costs, and improved business visibility. However, achieving these benefits isn't automatic - although many early adopters of SOA have been able to realize its promise fully, others have struggled to find the best architecture and design patterns for this approach. The SOA model is about asynchronous, loosely coup... (more)

SOA World Magazine "BPEL's Growing Up"

IT architectures have evolved to include process orchestration as a fundamental layer due in no small part to the emergence and widespread adoption of the WS-BPEL standard. WS-BPEL, also known as Business Process Execution Language or just BPEL, is a standard owned by OASIS that provides rich and comprehensive orchestration semantics. This article will provide a brief overview of how BPEL came to be what it is today and then focus on the latest developments in the BPEL standard and where we believe this standards area will go over the next few years. In particular some of the key... (more)