SOA Productivity Toolkit

The flexibility of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is only beneficial to an organisation if it is well managed. The careful selection of tools, technologies and libraries can make an enormous difference to the overall outcome - success or failure - of the project.

What we do

As part of the SOA Intelligence initiative, Intelligent Pathways has created tools to 'fill the gaps' left by the major vendors in support of the SOA development lifecycle. The tools have been developed in-house to bring efficiency to our large projects and are now made available as a toolkit for use on your own SOA projects. The tools in the kit build on our collective knowledge and experience in using the SOA offerings from the major players, including Oracle (plus BEA) and IBM. In addition to providing valuable tools SOA Intelligence is a methodology which is vendor agnostic and centered around the fundamental service- oriented design principles. The SOA Intelligence tools are themselves built using service-oriented principles and provide extensions of the existing capabilities from the major vendors in the following areas:

Portfolio Management: When service-oriented design principles are fully adopted, the services are reused by many composite applications. The repositories available through the vendor SOA stacks go a long way towards managing the runtime services however, there still remains a need to manage the portfolio of applications that bring value to the business outside of the services they compose. This tool provides management with visibility of the composite application and service development lifecycles to ensure that the applications that make up your SOA portfolio are delivered on time and on budget.

Architectural Blueprint: It is rare that a SOA initiative starts with a blueprint that marries the business to the technology through services. This product provides a highly conceptual platform for the early identification of business domains and service layers which ultimately ensures the consistent identification of services across the enterprise.

Service Discovery: As the number of services across the enterprise start to grow and change it is imperative that the business, architects, analysts and developers have the ability to search far and wide for reuse opportunities. Using an industry standard canonical representation of managed assets (services) and a highly interactive interface, the Service Discovery tool is able to crawl the repositories of the enterprise to ensure the highest level of reuse is attainable.

Service Provisioning: The timelines for a composite application are directly dependant on the service designers and developers. This tool uses the built in workflow capabilities of the underlying SOA stack to manage the service development lifecycle and uses the built in BAM capabilities to provide visibility of the progress for each service. In essence, the development process for SOA is being managed by a SOA application allowing you to make immediate use of your investment in the SOA stack from the first day of the project.

Advanced Human Workflow: Human workflow is a concept that has been used by many organisations for many years prior to the shift toward service orientation. This tool adopts capabilities now made available through Web 2.0 such as task-oriented mash ups and collaboration between workflow participants. As with all other tools in the SOA Intelligence kit, it uses the capabilities of the underlying SOA stack to deliver the solution.

SOA Testing: The inherent flexibility in the adoption of SOA requires a significant change in the approach to automated testing. Using the integration scenarios and use cases defined through Portfolio Management, the SOA Testing tool is able to provide test driven development at a level of automation that exceeds the out-of-the-box capabilities of individual middleware vendors. This tool is particularly powerful in the automation of event driven architectures and equally addresses both functional and non-functional concerns.

Release Management: Services are composed by many applications and as such traditional release procedures and artefacts need to be refocused toward service orientation. The establishment of a strong versioning strategy and dependency management framework is essential to the continued health of the SOA post initial deployment. This tool uses industry standard technologies to create and run the build scripts of composite applications. It also removes the burden of release from the developers by placing an intuitive tool in the hands of the release manager.

Exception Management: The process of managing exceptions is automated through the built in workflow capabilities of the chosen SOA stack. Strategies for extended retry, including exponential back-off are made available using services already available. Through visible exception reporting, IT and management are able to take further confidence in the deployed solutions.

SOA Monitoring: Some see SOA as a network of services deployed in a topology not too different to the computer networks that systems are run on. Others see SOA as a map of capabilities spread out over the landscape of the enterprise as defined by the conceptual architecture. Regardless of how you see it, services are invoked in a location (of the conceptual network or enterprise architecture) over a period of time and visibility over this is paramount to the optimisation of the SOA as a whole. This tool utilises rich internet application capabilities and advanced concepts borrowed from network management and geotemporal (location + time) monitoring systems to provide a real time view of the execution of the SOA in the context of your defined architectural landscape.

How you'll benefit

Each tool in the kit has been constructed from the ground up and used properly has been proven to fast-track even the most complex SOA initiative by helping you to:

• manage the delivery of services and composite applications in your portfolio
  
  
• establish a blueprint to guide the design and development of services across the enterprise
  
  
• discover services existing in disparate repositories across the enterprise
  
  
• orchestrate and monitor the service development lifecycle
  
  
• apply Web 2.0 concepts to achieve advanced human workflow
  
  
• establish confidence in your applications through automated end to end testing
  
  
• govern the versioning and release of services and composite applications
  
  
• increase responsiveness through real time exception management
  
  
• increase business and IT visibility at run time.
  
  

Visit the SOA Intelligence website to learn more about the tools we use to delivery successful SOA project.