Dev Breakthroughs

I am not blogging much these days – most of it is due to trying to get my bloody book finished. A case study and a finished anti-pattern chapter where recently pushed to the MEAP, and here’s one additional pattern from chapter 6 (service consumer patterns):

When we try to think about service consumers, the obvious candidates are, of course, other services. Nevertheless there are other software components that interact with services e.g. legacy systems, Non-SOA external systems or reporting databases. The Composite Frontend pattern deals with yet another type of service consumer – the User interface.

First let just verify that User interfaces aren’t in fact services. One reason user interfaces are not services is that they converge several business areas e.g. if you want to enter an order you’d probably also want to lookup information about the customer, maybe you’d also want to browse the product catalog, look at open invoices etc. In addition to convergence, user interfaces deliver data rather than process it. User interfaces are data producers (actually there’s one exception to that – where the UI is the front of a “human service” see orchestrated choreography pattern (in chapter 7) for more details.

Ok, so UIs aren’t services, does it matter? Well, it does and the problem is not that UIs aren’t services per se. The main challenge caused by user interfaces comes from their main difference i.e. the aggregation or convergence of several services into a cohesive and useful UI.

One of the prerequisites for successful SOA implementations is service repository–a place to store and track changes of the existing Services portfolio.

Anyone working on enterprise systems in the last 10 years will remember the initial tenets of Service Orientated Architecture were to decouple applications and to provide a well defined service interface, which can be reused by applications and composed into business processes. The idea of reuse and composition made SOA an attractive proposition that sent thousands of organizations on a very challenging treasure hunt. We have since read SOA's obituary and its resurrection with many stories of woe peppered with some success, but with very few achieving the holy grail of SOA. Meanwhile, the web has essentially become a service oriented platform, where information and functionality is a available through an API; the Web succeeded where the enterprise largely failed.

This success can be attributed to the fact that the web has been decentralized in its approach and has adopted less stringent technologies to become service oriented. Many early APIs were written using SOAP but now REST is the dominant force (though some are more REST than others). The publication of REST APIs has been rapidly increasing.

Formula 1 has been the race all the racers are waiting for and it has become the worlds most attracted race.

ESB performance has been equally discussed, interesting topic in the IT industry. esbperformance.org and the performance test kit described by it has become the de-facto standard of the ESB performance testing.

This time, the round #5 shows that the UltraESB has been taking the lead on every front. The other 7 open source ESB's that is being tested are as follows :
- WSO2 ESB

- Mule ESB CE

- Apache ServiceMix

- Fuse ESB

- Talend ESB SE

- JBoss ESB

- Petals ESB