SOA

Last month's article introduced the WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture, as well as an SOA framework and some services. This month's concludes by looking at more services and showing the architecture in action.

 Development Services
The WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture rigorously recognizes the need for a comprehensive software development platform as core. It's important that the development platform encompasses the entire lifecycle of software development, including requirements analysis, modeling and design, component development, testing, and code maintenance. The tooling must be compatible with the concepts of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and support the use of the best practices emerging via Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) and Service Oriented Development of Applications (SODA) methodologies. These characteristics are incumbent on the IBM software development platform.

At a high level, development services in the WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture enable people to complete specific tasks and create specific output based on their skills, their expertise, and their role in the enterprise:

Business analysts, who analyze business process requirements, need modeling tools to design and simulate business processes. Software architects need tools so they can model data, functional flows, and system interactions, and develop system topologies.

Integration specialists require the capabilities to configure and orchestrate components in developing integration solutions.

Programmers need tools to develop new business logic, such as J2EE components, portlets, and other custom service components.

Most importantly, the integration tooling environment promotes joint development, asset management, and deep collaboration between development roles through asset access and asset sharing. It's important to note that an organization's tool technologies and competencies will come from multiple vendors and, as a result, the presence of a multi-vendor framework like Eclipse is imperative in reducing the learning curve for the disparate roles in the development process. A standard tool framework like Eclipse also provides a common repository and base functions common across all the developer perspectives (for example, version control functions such as CVS and ClearCase, and utility functions such as edit, file, and print services). The development services provided through the WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture leverage the Eclipse base for their implementation.

Regardless of specific development roles, a high degree of collaboration is required in software development so each role is productive and efficient. The development tool platform provides an integrated set of tools that addresses the scope of integration development through role-based activities and across a multi-vendor tool environment. By separating concerns in the development process, each role can design, develop, and deploy artifacts specific to an individual's skills and responsibilities. A number of service functions are exposed as part of the development framework:

• Model services let analysts build visual models that are representative of business processes.
• Design services let models be staged into design, and include the ability to attribute the process with service components. These functions also enable the design and development of new integration components.
• Implementation services provide a way to move developed artifacts into production as part of an organization's configuration management standards.
• Test services support unit test as well as integrated test capabilities as part of the overall development lifecycle.

Business Innovation and Optimization Services
In combination with many of the services mentioned above, business innovation and optimization services provide an infrastructure for continuous improvement and innovation, enabling businesses to adapt to changing market dynamics and everyday operational disruptions. Well-engineered BPM solutions support a holistic approach to business management, enabling aligned objectives, role-based visibility, contextual insight, and in-time actions. It's critical to note that BPM requires a set of differentiated capabilities that supports and incorporates the needs of both business and IT professionals.

The Common Base Event (CBE) specification provides the common base event model for the WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture. Originally developed by the IBM Autonomic team in collaboration with partners, CBE is an emerging OASIS standard that defines a common XML schema-based representation of events, supporting encoding of logging, tracing, management, and business events.

Within the WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture, BPM services consist of three primary groups, each of which supports both IT and business events:

• Common event infrastructure (CEI) services provide emission services for filtering and converting native events into CBE form, event store services for storing, querying, and managing the events, and event catalog services for storing, querying, and managing the event schemes.
• Correlation services provide policy-driven filtering and correlation of events to detect situations of interest.
• Monitoring services use an observation model to define the appropriate monitoring context, map events to the context, and compute and manage the associated performance measures and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Presenting metrics and KPI are done using interaction services. Likewise, any analytic and data integration needed to support a BPM solution is done using information services.

The link between the development platform and business innovation and optimization services is a key aspect of the WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture. The ability to characterize key performance indicators as part of the modeling environment and generate specific event flags as part of the process model enable analysts to build management functionality into their business processes. Following the implementation of the integration components, the BPM layer captures and delivers event data and statistics that can be input back into the modeling environment. This approach lets organizations support iterative process re-engineering through a continuous business process improvement cycle.

IT Services Management
Beneath all the capabilities of the WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture are management services for security, directory, system management, and resource virtualization. The security and directory services include the authentication and authorization functions required for implementation, for example, single sign-on capabilities across a distributed and heterogeneous system. System management and virtualization services include functions across the operating environment to manage server, storage, network, and other resources; for example, clustering and virtualization services enable the efficient use of computing resources based on load patterns and other factors. The ability to leverage grids as part of a grid computing platform is an integral part of IT services management. While many management services perform functions tied directly to hardware or system implementations, others provide functions that interact directly with the integration services provided in other elements of the architecture through the ESB. These interactions typically involve services related to security, directory, and IT operational systems management as part of the support operating environment.

Hardware and software management services provide the capabilities needed to run and operate enterprise systems effectively. Many of these services are independent of the other integrated services; others provide capabilities and data to other integrated services so they can effect business performance management and system operation.

WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture in Action
In Figure 1, purchase order processing is an end-to-end composite integration process. The solution represents a sequence of services that are orchestrated though the components in the WebSphere Integration Reference Architecture.