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In June gartner published it’s Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA Infrastructure Projects. Due to the nature of SOA initiatives the selection of technologies and products aimed at supporting the implementation of the SOA infrastructure is done upfront. The resulting platform is shared among SOA applications and other integration initiatives in the enterprise.

To address the need for SOA infrastructure vendors typically have “SOA suites” of “SOA platforms”. These package products like:

• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
• Orchestration tools, like BPEL
• Web services management tools
• Registry/repository products to support SOA governance requirements
• Policy management and enforcement
• Other components, such as activity monitoring (BAM) and business rules

Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA Infrastructure

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All open source vendors are in the visionary quadrant. In some cases their offerings are more modern than the Leaders’ products, since they are hardly burdened with backward compatibility issues. However these vendors are constrained by their small size or sometimes inconsistent execution.

In general the open source platforms are less expensive and easier to implement and deploy. However their offerings are generally less comprehensive than the Leaders’ offerings. If these offerings fit your requirements this could be an easy-to-use/low-cost SOA infrastructure for your organisation. The open source platforms are a strong technology offering.

Other recent Magic Quadrants for SOA and integration

• Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic Application Integration Projects
• Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA Application Projects

While preparing guidelines for the usage of the Oracle Service Bus (OSB) I was looking for a definition of a Service Bus. There wasn’t one on my blog yet (more posts on integration) so i decided to use the following and share them with you.

Forrester Service Bus definition

From 2009 Forrester has used this one:

An intermediary that provides core functions to makes a set of reusable services widely available, plus extended functions that simplify the use of the ESB in a real-world IT environment.

Erl Service Bus definition

Thomas Erl offers the following description of a Service Bus::

An enterprise service bus represents an environment designed to foster sophisticated interconnectivity between services. It establishes an intermediate layer of processing that can help overcome common problems associated with reliability, scalability, and communications disparity.

An Enterprise Service Bus is seen by Erl et al as a pattern. That is why it is even more important to share what that patterns is. Later on I’ll also shortly describe the VETRO pattern. Also a very useful pattern to use when comparing integration tools or developing guide lines.

Erl Enterprise Service Bus pattern

On the SOA patterns site we learn that an enterprise service bus represents an environment designed to foster sophisticated interconnectivity between services. The Enterprise Service Bus pattern is a composite pattern based on:

• Asynchronous Queuing basically an intermediary buffer, allowing service and consumers to process messages independently by remaining temporally decoupled.
• Service Broker composed of the following patterns
• - Data Model transformation to convert data between disparate schema structures.
• - Data Format transformation to dynamically translate one data format into another.
• - Protocol bridging to enable communication between different communication protocols by dynamically converting one protocol to another at runtime.
• Intermediate routing meaning message paths can be dynamically determined through the use of intermediary routing logic.
• With optional the following patterns: Reliable Messaging, Policy Centralization, Rules Centralization, and Event-Driven Messaging. Also have a look at slide 12 etc of the SOA Symposium Service Bus presentation.

VETRO pattern for Service Bus

The VETRO pattern was introduced by David Chappell, writer of the 2004 book Enterprise Service Bus.

• V – Validate: Validation of messages eg based on XSD or schematron.
• E – Enrich: Adding data from applications the message doesn’t originate from.
• T – Transform: Transform the data model, data format or the protocol used to send the message.
• R – Routing: Determine at runtime where to send the message to.
• E – Execute: You can see this as calling the implementation.

We also used this pattern to compare Oracle integration tools and infrastructure. It can be very well used while choosing the appropriate tools for a job and deciding on guidelines on how to use these tools.

The world’s largest conference dedicated to SOA, cloud computing and service technology will have it’s 2012 version in London! Hosting the 5th SOA Symposium and the 4th International Cloud Computing Symposium on September 24-25. This brings the symposium back to Europe after last years visit to Brasilia, Brazil. The SOA Symposiums website has been rebranded to Service Tech Symposium.

There are several blog posts on previous editions of the SOA Symposium available in blogs. During this years event the following books will be launched:

• Cloud Computing: Concepts & Technology
• SOA with REST: Principles, Patterns & Constraints
• Next Generation SOA: A Real-World Guide to Modern Service-Oriented Computing

Call for presentations

The 2012 program committee invites submissions on all topics related to SOA, cloud computing and service technologies. The primary tracks are:

• Cloud Computing Architecture & Patterns
• New SOA & Service-Orientation Practices & Models
• Service Modeling & Analysis Techniques
• Service Infrastructure & Virtualisation
• Cloud-based Enterprise Architecture
• Real World Case Studies
• Service Engineering & Service Programming Techniques
• Interactive Services & the Human Factor
• New REST & Web Services Tools & Techniques

Additional information the 2012 SOA Symposium Call for Papers are available online. Download the Speaker Form. All submissions must be reviewed no later than July 15, 2012.

Recently I read Do more with SOA integration that was published December 2011. This book is a mash-up of eight earlier published works from Packt, including Service Oriented Architecture: An Integration Blueprint, Oracle SOA Suite Developer’s Guide, WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g, and SOA governance. More details on this title:

• Table of contents
• Free sample chapter – Loosely coupling services.

Target audience according to the publisher:

If you are a SOA architect or consultant who wants to extend your knowledge of SOA integration with the help of a wide variety of Packt books, particularly covering Oracle tools and products, then “Do more with SOA Integration: Best of Packt” is for you. You should have a good grasp of Service Oriented Architecture, but not necessarily of integration principles. Knowledge of vendor-specific tools would be an advantage but is not essential.

My thoughts

My assumption is that most people won’t read the around 700 pages of this book cover to cover. In my view it is a good reference book to get a solid introduction to SOA and integration in general.

To deepen you knowledge on real world scenario’s there a good examples eg given in the chapters on Extending enterprise application integration and Service oriented ERP integration. The first gives an example of of BPEL orchestrating various web service exposed on ERP systems (SAP, Siebel) using EAI (TIBCO, webMethods). This sample includes an example of centralized error handling. The latter shows an integration of PeolpleSoft CRM 8.9 and Oracle Applications 11g using BPEL 10g. The ideas and mechanismes of the integration will also hold in the 11g version.

Chapter 14 on SOA Integration a Scenario in detail, offers another example on how to use Oracle SOA technology (10g again) to integrate legacy systems into a more modern application landscape. It does a thorough job.

The chapter on Base Technologies has parts that are based on the Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint. Beside that it offers a good introduction on transactions, JCA, SCA and SDO. Their fundamentals are well explained without getting too technical. So should you be looking for coding examples on these topics, there are other great sources.

When reading about XML for integration I noticed that it answers questions we get from our customers on a regular basis like: How to design XSDs – XML Schema Definitions. Questions on when to use a type or an Element, chose targetNamespace or XMLSchema as the default namespace, the number of namespaces to use. These are all well adressed in the book.

Where on the other hand a complete view on the following statement could fill at least a whitepaper:

Adopt and develop design techniques, naming conventions, and other best practices similar to those used in object-oriented modelling to address the issues of reuse, modularization, and extensibility. Some of the common design techniques are discussed in the later sections.

The chapter on loose coupling offers an example of how to achieve this using the Oracle Service Bus. It is hard to overrate the importance of loose coupling since a lot of both the technical and the business advantage rely on whether or not this loose coupling is achieved.

Bottomline

As a reference this is a good starting point to learn about SOA and integration in general. It could be more consistent on some details and with the great BPEL and BPM tooling these days I wouldn’t implement processes in an ESB. Of course there is a good chapter (12) with an eaxmple of using both BPM and BPEL. As mentioned before it has some great illustrative examples of real world scenarios. The bottom line is that I would recommend this book to people looking for a reference on SOA and integration.

Cons:
Some text seems a little dated.

Pros:
Good description of SOA and integration in general; practical ; solid introduction on the XML stuff, transactions, JCA and SCA; nice real world integration examples.

Additional reviews

If you’re interested in other reviews on this book, visit the ADF Code Corner blog by Frank Nimphius, AMIS blog by Lucas Jellema, or this SOA / BPM on Fusion Middleware blog by Niall Commiskey.

Since this blog is also dedicated to sharing resources that are valueable to me I decided to share my reading list of 2011 with you.

Lean Integration: An Integration Factory Approach to Business Agility

A great best practices book on integration. The first part provides description of the business value of Lean. It introduces the core concepts. As a manager that doesn’t need all the details you could just read this part and you can get a good grasp of the ideas presented.

The second part translates the lean principles from the world of manufacturing to the world of systems integration. It has great case studies that shows the principles applied in a real world context.

Part three of the book provides a “how to” guide. This can be used as a reference and as such is a great desk-top reference manual. This book is great and a must read for all technology and business practitioners and innovators.

Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA

Great reference (not a book that I read front to back) on Web Service Design from Thomas Erl and his co-authors. This book focuses exclusively on the contract part of the service. Due to the depth it is a extensive resource to use besides others. The book is filled with extensive examples on how to meet the goals of SOA properly using contract design.

Via the site of the publisher and on iTunes are additional service design podcasts by the authors of the book. Could be a great resource to start with.

The Back of the Napkin (Expanded Edition): Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

This is a great book on problem solving, extremely useful and in a sense thought provoking. It structures problem-solving into a six by five visual codex. This makes sense; you can literally see the evolution of the thought processes and the development of the insights take shape through the pages. Fun read as well.

Just uploaded the presentation I gave at the Seminar “Architecture and Governance”:

In October 2011 Gartner published it’s Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies. Gartners sees the market for SOA governance technologies keeps changing, driven by more comprehensive requirements from end users. The most important change since their previous report in 2009:

Clients today prefer to buy SOA governance solutions that will serve their purpose throughout the whole SOA endeavor, governing services and artifacts through different projects from planning and design all the way to implementation operation and retirement.

The most important change that I see at our customers compared with two year ago is that they more more interested and willing to invest in governance technologies.

What is SOA Governance about

SOA governance technology is about:

• Tracking and monitoring the artifacts in a SOA
• Enforcing and ensuring compliance with the policies associated with the artifacts
• Measuring the outcomes related to their use

Oracle’s SOA governance offering

Oracle’s offering in the Governance technologies market is part of it’s Fusion Middleware product line. It includes the following products (see this this blog):

• Oracle Enterprise Gateway and Oracle Web Services Manager – Full life cycle policy management
• Oracle Enterprise Repository
• Oracle Service Registry
• Oracle SOA Management Pack

This number of products and the complexity of Oracle’s offering can make it hard to get a good grasp of what product will cater your specific needs. Should you need more insight visit our SOA governance seminar.

On December 13th Whitehorses will host a seminar on SOA and Governance. During this seminar we will show the value of a proper architecture and governance for your organization. In the presentation you will get clear guidelines and steps on a pragmatic approach for implementing a manageable SOA solution.

Some of the topics:

• What is SOA Governance and Why do we need it?
• SOA reference architecture – The importance of solid standardization.
• Service life-cycle governance – Design and build the right services and the proper way to reuse them.
• Service repository – With examples of repositories based on Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) and a wiki.

rsvp.

From now on counting down in days to the upcoming ODTUG Kscope 2011. ODTUG is a user group for for a wide range of technologists working with the Oracle platforms. During this conference I’ll be presenting on solid Service Bus implementations using the Oracle Service Bus, Mediator or both. The full schedule of Kscope is here.

Later this month on the 27th and 28th of April the 4th International SOA Symposium and the 3th International Cloud Symposium will be for the first time held in Latin America – Brasilia, Brazil. More info on previous editions can be found on this blog. The 2011 SOA Symposium program consists of:

• Expert Speaker Sessions
• 10+ Conference Tracks
• 4 Expert Panels
• 4 Keynote Speeches

Given the location simultaneous translation (English-Portuguese-English) will be available in all technical sessions. For the complete agenda or resources from previous conference, check the site. Videos from the 2010 edition of the SOA Symposium can be found on InfoQ.