New Angle to look at SOA...

--- essence from Ganesh Prasad's Practical SOA 

Among numerous trends that has struck the IT industry, SOA holds an important place. Service Oriented Architecture has been a buzz word, for a certain period of time. Most of the enterprises and businesses proudly announce that they "MOVE to SOA"; or their "Business is SOA compliant". But when we take a look at their implementation, still it resides in the complex, spaghetti kind of set up. This complexity and non SOA existence can majorly cause

• performance drawbacks
• single point of failure

 If a proper SOA implementation has been executed, it ideally should have

• loosely coupled components
• good governance
• re-usability of components

In a proper SOA architecture, there are 3 main lego blocks namely

• Service Container
• Message Broker
• Process Coordinator 

Service container - Holds the service logic (eg: WSO2 AS)

Process Coordinator - Run time / dynamic process evaluations based on state is handled here. (eg: WSO2 BPS)

Broker - Acts as an adapter, mediator and transformer. Sits in between two applications perform the tasks. (eg: WSO2 ESB)

In any kind of complex deployment environment, first it should be clearly identified what is needed where, out of the above 3 main components.

When the coarse grain analysis is over, in the fine grain analysis, supporting SOA elements such as Rule components, Data services components, Presentation components, Governance components, Registry/repository components etc. can be identified and then deploy the relevant systems appropriately. 

SOA is NOT EASY. But SIMPLE. So plan well & handle with care.

WSO2 Releases Carbon 3.2.0 platform

Whoa!!!!
For the first time in history, WSO2 released all of its incredible products to the SOA world. Keeping a full stop for the chunk mode releases, where in each release only 3-4 products get released, this time WSO2 succeeded the dream of releasing THIRTEEN products all together.
It was a time that all the engineers spent sleepless nights and restless weekends; With all their whole hearted spirit, effort, commitment and dedication, it was a dream come true.

Focusing on a bunch of new features that were put out with this release, the complex platform has solved many of the earlier problems that were existing in the carbon platform. With the new enhancements and fixes, the platform has improved by leaps and bounds in its stability, availability and scalability aspects.

The ESB has increased its competitive advantage by introducing

• Deployment Synchronizer which synchronizes the deployed archives arcoss all the nodes in a clustered environment
• HL7 transport which comes as an optional feature that is pluggable to an existing ESB
• Event mediator which publishes events to topics defined in the built in event broker
• HTTP Relay transport which streams pure HTTP messages based on Java NIO for ultra fast HTTP routing

and the list grows. You can refer to the latest ESB download and experience the novel difference and super performance.

WS02 Business Process Server has come up with couple of enhancements in order to cater competitive business environments

• Clustering support which comes as a in-built feature of BPS 
• BPEL package hot update which facilitate automatic versioning of uploaded BPEL packages etc 

where you can download the product and try it on your own and feel the new difference.

Across the platform there are several improvements done on stabilizing the middle-ware platform.

• Kerberos support as a new security policy
• ApacheDS LDAP usage as the default user store
• RememberMe feature where the current session is kept cached
• Embedded Tomcat 7 integration that makes the performance faster and smoother. 

With all the matured products like EBS, AS (which was earlier known as WSAS), G-Reg and BPS, two newly adopted kid products too were released. To name, they are Complex Event Processor (CEP) and Message Broker (MB).
Out of them, CEP supports Drools Fusion runtime engine where it comes as a built in engine with CEP and a pluggable Esper runtime engine. These are query processing engines where it handles complex processings of events published on CEP buckets. Also this has the capability of creating a range of brokers from local, WS-Event and JMS-Qpid.

Download the WSO2 Carbon 3.2.0 products from here and experience the ease and comfort of working with the perfect matching middleware solution to your enterprise.

Use WSO2 Carbon Studio to wire your business to SOA

SOA,Web Services, Cloud etc. etc.
All being heard around for some time. Each and every jargon above holds an enormous weight in current enterprise paradigm.
In an era that every enterprise get involved with Web Services, every business adopts its items to SOA, most enterprise services attempt to explore the cloud integration, I am pretty sure that you also do not want to be left out.
Still it is not too late for you to step in to the world of SOA. You too may be wondering how you can put these cool ideas into practice in your business or in your other working scenarios.

So since you have some up and running business logic with you, it is just a matter of wiring them properly from the middle-ware layers to adopt your firm biz-logic connect to SOA environment. It is more or less like plug and play scenario. So you see, it is pretty easy and straight forward.

But... how can you execute this? How do you solder your biz-logic into the circuit of SOA?
Don't worry. The soldering iron comes into your rescue. "WSO2 Carbon Studio".

It is a one stop solution that provides you with tools that can adopt your legacy logics, software applications etc to meeting needs of SOA. Carbon Studio is a simple Eclipse-based web development tool. And also these tools are extended to deploy your newly built or modified services in WSO2 Carbon Products. (such as Data Service Server, Enterprise Service Bus, Business Process Server etc.)
The best part is that Carbon Studio not only assists you in developing your applications, it allows you to test your written stuff, deploy them in various servers mentioned above and even monitor them.

So you see, within a couple of minutes, your legacy application has become a fully qualified service that would compete with and cater for other businesses in a SOA manner.

Want to test this cool product on your own?
Let's demonstrate it with a simple end to end application then.
Imagine you own a shop. A shop that sells cameras lets say. Cool...
Acme Shop which sells cameras :)

Let's look at some business perspectives...
1). You should have a stock of cameras, a set of customers, a group of vendors etc.
You need to maintain all these records in a database as you do in normal practice.

2). Then there should be some easy way of monitoring these stocks. You should see what cameras are finished, what cameras have abondened stocks etc. For that an easy way of viewing all those details would be ideal.

3). Define distinct operations related to business (like admin related operations, purchasing operations, product related operations). These should have clear separations and for each of these there should be a certain 'end point'. (Eg: an end point for a purchasing operation can be either a payment gateway like VISA card or a normal customer)

4). You should easily get a notification if any product is reaching the reorder value. That is if some camera has only 5 items left in stock, a new order for that type should be placed at a vendor. For that to be done, a reorder alert should be obtained.

5). User counter where users can buy any camera item that are to be sold.

6). Administrator monitoring capabilities to monitor the whole business

Relate this to SOA. Now this becomes Acme Online Shopping Cart.
Let's look at each point in SOA perspective.
1). A data service is required to hold all database records and a data service server (WSO2 DSS)
2). A gadget that show up the current stock status which is hosted in a gadget server (WSO2 GS)
3). Services (or proxy services) like AdminService, PurchasingService etc. and respective endpoints for each service (AdminServiceEP, PurchasingServiceEP). All these services and EPs are recommended to host in a message mediation environment like an enterprise service bus (WSO2 ESB)
4). A business process that triggers a notification ones items get into a predefined reorder level can be hosted in a business process server (WSO2 BPS)
5) & 6). User and Admin can be given shopping facilities and monitoring facilities via a portal which can be hosted in an application server (WSO2 AS)

Read the next post on how to simulate each and every one of this in Carbon Studio.