SOA composite applications are inherently distributed. The goal is to have the different services developed by different programmers, on different platforms and languages, and reused in different business solutions. Testing distributed composite applications poses some unique challenges. Unit testing is certainly becoming more important.

I spoke with Parasoft recently. Parasoft has been in the software quality business for 18 years. Parasoft’s SOAtest provides Automated Error Prevention (AEP), which improves application quality through the automatic prevention of errors during the entire software development lifecycle. According to Parasoft, 80 percent of errors are introduced during development.

SOAtest provides a graphical interface for the chief architect to define XML-based governance rules, and policies. For companies starting on their SOA journeys, this provides developers new to SOA with development guidelines (policies set by the architect). The policy-based approach offers quality control and consistency early in the development life cycle.

SOAtest parses the service asset, which can be a BPEL process or a WSDL interface, into its operations, and then automatically performs a four-step check:
• Check for WSI interoperability
• Semantic check (both an internal link check to make sure everything is available and an external check against metadata),
• Schema check
• Pattern check using the rule wizard.

Parasoft also offers comprehensive security testing and provides early detection of any security vulnerabilities of the service. The results are fed back into the repository, which reports on quality metrics. The repository then stores a set of metadata for each service defining the quality of the service. Imagine having a quality index of services in a repository! That might encourage more reuse – or alternatively, better programming.

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0)

Software AG has just announced enhancements to four different integration offerings. In the past, Software AG has had difficultly getting a lot of traction with their integration offerings. They focused on XML early on, a bit too early. It was hard to sell an XML repository when few companies at the time had much XML data.

Their EII offering released last spring for semantic integration is also a bit ahead of its time. While semantic integration will offer the next wave of agility and productivity, not too many people know what it is yet.

Recently Software AG has partnered with Fujitsu to jointly develop the CentraSite SOA repository. CentraSite manages SOA metadata assets. CentraSite is now shipping with Software AG’s new offerings. Software AG is also reselling Fujitsu’s BPM tool, the Enterprise Business Process Manager (EBPM).

New enhancements to EBPM include support for importing Visio diagrams as well as BPMN. EBPM supports both automated processes and human workflow. Process models can be stored in the CentraSite Repository.

Enterprise Information Integrator (EII) now supports UDDI registration of the Web services generated by EII. This means that creating a single view of the customer from multiple data sources can be wrapped as a Web service and registered in a UDDI compliant registry. The services are WS-I compliant. EII now supports importing Adabase databases. These Web services representing business views can be stored and managed in CentraSite.

Software AG’s ESB - Enterprise Service Integrator (ESI) - now includes BPEL, improved support for SOAP and UDDI and an automated schema/instance generator. Web service orchestrations can also be stored and managed in CentraSite.

The fourth part of the announcement is that Enterprise Legacy Integrator (ELI) can now expose legacy resources as Web services, register and manage them in CentraSite.

This set of announcements is laying a foundation for an SOA platform with CentraSite providing the SOA governance and management infrastructure.

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Gartner integration conference is one of the most well attended integration conferences. There were over 1000 people in Orlando last week. Not surprisingly, it’s an occasion for many vendors to make news announcements. This December, most of the announcements were around SOA.

TIBCO announced a service offering for implementing an SOA called the TIBCO Accelerated Value Framework (AVF) version 6.0. Developed by its Professional Services Group six years ago (thus the v.6 designation), AVF offers a methodology, best practices, packaged services, and workshops for developing SOA solutions. While TIBCO claims its customers have been using TIBCO technology to develop SOA solutions, TIBCO has not previously been beating the SOA drum loudly. With this announcement that is changing; TIBCO plans to emphasize SOA more in its messaging.

This past year, SAP previewed 500 enterprise services, repositioning SAP as a set of enterprise services. In Q2 2006, SAP will deliver production-ready services. By the end of 2006, its XI integration broker will repositioned as an ESB as part of their SOA story. SAP plans to have all its applications service ready by the end of 2007. Companies will not necessarily be able to buy pieces of functionality as services, but at least SAP application functionality will be exposed as services. This is key as few companies have SAP alone.

Cordys, a Netherlands-based company trying to break into the US market, was previously positioned in Gartner’s application platform suite quadrant and is repositioning itself as a RAD tool for SOA. The Cordys Composite Application Framework includes an ESB, Business Process Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Master Data Management. Cordys is currently developing a set of reference accounts.

GT Software’s Ivory mainframe integration product is being positioned as an SOA tool that enables the mainframe to become an active participant in an SOA. It allows mainframe developers to easily wrap mainframe functionality as Web services without the need for consulting services. Ivory provides BPEL for the mainframe for visual assembly and runtime orchestration of mainframe services. It supports multi-step services, such as a CICS transaction, running through a number of green screens, then doing performing some functions, such as aggregating results – all without coding.

Farabi Technology Corp. announced the release of HostFront Enterprise Server (HFES) version 4.0. Running on a Microsoft platform, HostFront provides host access and integration with built-in clustering, session load balancing and failover. It can sustain 10,000 concurrent sessions with one host. HostFront natively integrates with MS Visual Studio, providing MS developers drag and drop capability for generating WSDL interfaces to mainframe systems. Farabi claimes this reduces programmer time by 80 percent. HostFront can generate code for TCP/IP or HTTP and supports both persistent and non-persistent connections.

iWay indicated that in January 2006 they plan to announce a new suite of SOA based tools.

One of the few companies NOT jumping on the SOA bandwagon is Microsoft. In their view, these “buzz words” are generally a four-year hype cycle and since we’re two years into the SOA hype cycle so they see no reason to jump onto this particular bandwagon. This seems to be a unique positioning in the market. To my knowledge, SOA has been considered a best practice for over two decades. SOA has much more relevance to creating agile IT infrastructures that can respond more quickly to business change. In my view, we are at the very beginning of the SOA journey. It will require discipline, process, methodology, governance, and best practices to succeed. It is hard work with large payoffs. While it may be a hot topic, SOA is not empty hype. What do you think? Can any company afford to sit the SOA wave out?

Posted by bethgb in Industry Trends | Permalink | Comments (3)