Michael's Coding Den: SOA

Exception handling in SOA

Wed, 30 May 2007 14:16:59 GMT

Good article http://www.infoq.com/articles/lublinsky-soa-exception;jsessionid=C91C7DA3C337E0CF8B1C7C10FB4E7C84 described how to handle the exceptions in SOA systems.

Author describes the Logging Service which gets/resolves/logs all incoming exceptions from the different services.

Exposing WCF from COM+

Tue, 29 May 2007 19:03:55 GMT

A sample of how to expose WCF from COM+: http://nayyeri.net/archive/2007/05/28/expose-a-wcf-service-from-a-com-component.aspx

Microsoft ESB Guidance

Wed, 23 May 2007 15:59:05 GMT

MS published the CTP1 of their ESB based on the BizTalk, which includes: SOA services, guidelines, patterns and samples to build custom ESB

All details and documentations are there http://www.codeplex.com/esb

Infrastructure never adds value!

Tue, 08 May 2007 20:32:43 GMT

"Infrastructure never ever adds value, only solution on the top of this provides value"

This quotation should be on the desk of every CEO.

Reference: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/schwegler-soa-wcf-wf-presentation

EDA on SOA

Sun, 06 May 2007 20:53:56 GMT

Business intelligence (BI) has a lot of benefits to an organization, and developers usually starts from the ETL - extracting data from external sources, transform data, and loading transformed data to the data mart.

But what if we are building SOA system and what to apply BI? The experienced designers will see that SOA and BI conflict with each other. BI and SOA have conflicting principles and needs.

They are crossed at:

SOA tenets- "share schema", "service autonomy"
BI tenets - access to the inner data

SOA relies on: Policy, End Point, Contracts and Messages and there is no other way to have access to the internal service data for the BI.

What should we do in this case? Invalidate SOA principles, using the existed contracts or implement "data contract" for BI? All cases are not good - in first case the consistency is broken and on other case we have the problems with network bandwidth (transferring too much data).

But wait, what about Event Driven Architecture (EDA)? Doesn't it the exactly that clue which will resolve conflicts between SOA and EDA?!

Yep, it DOES.

If we move our SOA to the "Push Model" principle, introducing EDA as the base for our SOA services (fusing them together), we gain a lot of benefits - SOA principles are consisted, and BI can get the desired data from the event streams.

More about "EDA on SOA" read at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb419307.aspx

ISB: Internet Service Bus

Sat, 05 May 2007 23:38:01 GMT

Microsoft released the first Internet Service Bus built on the top of BizTalk. ISB shipped as Biztalk Services (CTP version is available)

The idea is taking the ESB and elevating it more broadly - allowing to build and run composite application at Internet scale

Resources:

BPEL Primer Initial Draft

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:45:30 GMT

The BPEL Primer document was published: wsbpel-primer-draft_April_11.doc

Reading it right now.

The SOA Component Model

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 16:47:26 GMT

Rob High (Chief SOA architect, IBM) presentation about Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) - more robust and flexible way in designing your SOA systems

Source: InfoQ: The SOA Component Model

Resources: SCA

SaaS Sample Application

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 22:38:13 GMT

Microsoft published the sample of SaaS application, demonstrating the principles and architecture of building SaaS applications.

Source code, documentation and video is available.

Distributed Data Management

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 19:10:49 GMT

In last year I've met with the issue of providing the reliable cache for the clusters. Some ideas were described in my posts. After that any other solutions were found, but I had no time to describe and publish them.

The most appealing way is the Distribution DataGrid solution. I discussed it a little bit with the Niklas Malic (Enterprise Architect at Microsoft), in the aspect of ESB (Enterprise Serial Bus).

The main idea is to abstract applications from data without acknowledging where data is, thus removing data redundancy.

Publish the draft design of distributed data management diagram.

Data Federation (DF) pattern is responsible for the gathering and analyzing the SQL of applications where we apply this service. All metadata is kept into Data Service.

All app's requests to the DB are combined with pre-collected SQL metadata to resolve/collect/transform all required data using Data Consolidation (DC) pattern.

DC, knowing all necessary info, connects to DB, extract portion of data and then fills Zone Data Cache.

This solution depicts the main principles of using data without knowing its location. Current services aimed to be used above ESB, providing additional "data bus"

Resources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Technorati tags: ESB, SOA, data distribution

SOA Terminology.

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:14:32 GMT

Feel yourself a SOA geek?! If so, you should know what are the:

SOA foundation reference model
SOA solution stack
SOA lifecycle
Governance
Business alignment
BPEL

If not - just read this http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-term1/index.html?ca=drs-

Technorati tags: SOA, BPEL, Business alignment

Event Driven Architecture (EDA) Overview

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 20:19:11 GMT

Some time ago I wanted to write an article about EDA (Event-driven architecture), but recently I've found the really good overview: http://elementallinks.typepad.com/bmichelson/2006/02/eventdriven_arc.html

Besides this, the links below are useful for those who are interested in EDA

Technorati tags: SOA, EDA, Event-driven architecture

SOA presentation and case study

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 22:58:15 GMT

John Evdemon published resources related to SOA. Some of them are in my SOA section, some aren't.

The most interesting link that I missed is "architectural case study" and presentation of "Building an ESB on the Microsoft Platform". See Jonh's post for more details.

Understanding SaaS Architecture [Presentation]

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:50:03 GMT

Presentation of the SaaS Architecture. Needless to say more.

Thanks to Gianpaolo.

Integration Patterns

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 13:27:19 GMT

Before integrating of existent system into new one you should leverage the approaches that suits your business the best. Using ESB is not always appropriate solution, because requirements may vary from project to project and you can be limited with the resources to realize ESB. Often you need to provide a bottom-up implementation.

There are three integration patterns you should rely on,

data federation: creating view/service containers to federate structured and unstructured information, based on metadata, without creating data redundancy;
data consolidation: creating data warehousing and business intelligence (BI);
enterprise application integration: ESB
new distributed enterprise application integration: distributed ESB

Depending on such factors as current architecture, available resources, implementation scope, ROI and speed of implementation these patterns will help you to choose right approach from top-down to bottom-up implementation.

References: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

SQL Service Broker - manage your SOA data

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 12:58:12 GMT

In large-scale application "data distribution" plays important role to bring necessary data to the proper place in the proper time with acceptable latency.

Simple plain database ,that keep all data in specific place, is not appropriate. We need something more intelligent, service that knows how to deliver necessary portion of data.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 solves this issue providing us "Service Broker (SSB)" that helps to build scalable and secure database applications.

Resources:

1) Service Broker presentation: http://www.novicksoftware.com/Presentations/service-broker/sql-server-2005-service-broker-andrew-novick.ppt

2) SSB home site: http://www.sqlservicebroker.com/

3) Roger Wolter (MS Solution Architect) blog about data distribution with SQL Server: http://blogs.msdn.com/rogerwolterblog/default.aspx

Mitigate you work with Web Service Software Factory

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:59:53 GMT

"WS Software Factory" was announced recently.

This VSIP helps you to save your time creating Web Services: messages and service design, entity translation, data access layer creation, applying WS security. These steps are automated and performed by several clicks.

Very amazing, it really saves time for those who develop WS or SOA services.

WebCast is available too.

ESB and Data Grids - discussion with Nicklas Malik

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 20:52:31 GMT

Today Nicklas Malik (Microsoft Enterprise Architect) posted a new entry in his blog relating to my last post (and here) about ESB and DataGrids and discussion started again :)

I've desribed the idea of making ESB orchestration responsible for updating zone's data-cache and NickMalik moved a bit further and put controling of data-cache beyond main ESB, into data grid ESB. Reasonable approach.

PS: Reading Nicklas since 2005 I'm noticing that he's the person with whom I shared idea the best of all. A lot of good sound ideas, that wasn't expressed in blog by me, but expressed by him splendidly.

It would be a good thing to work with him.

Using Data Grid in large scale systems

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 14:16:37 GMT

Nicklas Malik suggested his even-driven idea of using Data Grid to create very fast delivery of data across a distributed infrastructure.

It'd be interesting to work over this idea in the context of ESB.

Understanding SOA with Web Services

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 13:06:42 GMT

FTPOnline published the first chapter from the "Understanding SOA with Web Services" book.

This chapter describes the basis of building SOA systems, description of WS standards, and overview of the ESB.

It's good book I've read about 2 years ago and recommend those who is trying himself in the SOA projects.

Web 2.0 + SOA

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 13:15:45 GMT

Michael Platt's (Microsoft Architect) article comprises his ideas from his blog about Web 2.0 + SOA and his architecturing perspective on the new platform "SOA + Services".

A good overview how to rises beyond ESB.

PS: SOA in plain language is described here

Specify hardware for you SOA

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 14:16:55 GMT

Service Modeling Language (SML) allows to specify hardware resources that take a part into SOA systems.

The idea is to give architects a better view into the system resources on which a SOA runs that provides better interoperability between different vendors.

Hope it becomes a standard soon.

Web 2.0 Layers

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:18:05 GMT

Before moving to the Web 2.0 take into account the base layers that need to be realized inclusing this one and this tablulations.

X-Factor in SOA

Mon, 22 May 2006 08:23:14 GMT

In this article Joseph examines using of XML/XSLT family in building neat messages in SOA.

Useful for beginners XML Data Designers.

SOA Patterns

Sat, 06 May 2006 11:09:27 GMT

Small article by Ron Jacobs about patterns and anti-patterns in SOA.

Web Service Message Queue (WSMQ)

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:23:41 GMT

One more realization of MQ but now for web.

Web Service Message Queue (WSMQ) is a simple message queuing alternative for enabling reliable, professional-grade applications. Compared with other popular message queues, WSMQ is easier to deploy, write code for, manage and scale.

Don't let SODA ruin your SOA

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 16:51:34 GMT

Moving to the SOA in the existed architecture we should avoid ruining SOA under SODA.

This articles give some explanations: http://www.ftponline.com/ea/magazine/fall/features/gvanhuizen/

Service Orientation in Enterprise Computing

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 14:59:20 GMT

Michael Burner in his article gives a clear explanation what is it the SOE and SO. Nice article to get a distinct description of SOA and services

SOA basic

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 21:08:49 GMT

In this entry I will try to post references to the SOA articles I find cognitive for those who is starting his way in SOA engineering.

"Understanding Microsoft Integration Technologies": article that helps u to make right direction in the disributed world of services
"Service Orientation and Its Role in Your Connected Systems Strategy": It's a vision for service orientation and service-oriented architecture in enterprise computing
"How ASP.NET Web Services Work": Understanding the inner general concepts of Web-services.
"Understanding XML Schema": XSD is a central role in Web services where it serves as one of the fundamental pillars that higher levels of abstraction are built upon.
"Principles of Service Design: Service Patterns and Anti-Patterns": This article describes four base SOA tenets and author shows the several most common flaws designs.
"Service-Orient Integration": Trying to apply interoperability among systems with different tech architecture - four tenets we should proceed.
"Implementing Service-Oriented Integration with ASP.NET and BizTalk": Practical using SOA with DTO, Service and Shared Interfaces.
"Extend the ASP.NET WebMethod Framework by Adding XML Schema Validation"

Additional resources: "Web Services Specifications", "Messaging Specifications", "WS-I Basic Profile 1.0", "Microsoft WS-I Basic Security Profile 1.0 Reference Implementation"

WS-E updates: WS-C, WS-AT, WS-BA

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 06:08:58 GMT

The WS specifications related to Transactions (WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity) have just been updated: http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/webservices/understanding/specs/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnglobspec/html/wsatspecindex.asp