SOA Tips: For Asynchronous, Peer-to-Peer Collaborations Use Multiple MEPs

The ‘Wire’ Is Global Whether you are going to directly base your ‘wire’ design on the internet, or you are going to limit it to some particular set of users, you want to make sure that every ‘wire’ design you do, works globally. You have to get outside of the confines of the internet. The [...]

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SOA Tips: Prefer Use of Document/Literal Rather than RPC

Prefer ‘document’ encoding and ‘literal’ use over other types for interoperability. Services exposed using Document style encoding with Literal use are better-suited for coarse-grained interactions and better represent the data exchanged. They provide the ability to validate the XML data if the XML Schema is available. You could specify XSL transforms to Transform messages using [...]

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My Article Nominated for JDJ Annual Readers’ Choice 2007 Awards

A couple of days back, my co-worker Prakash Aradhya pointed me to the JDJ Annual Readers’ Choice Awards 2007 poll indicating that my favorite Open ESB open-source project, that I’d been a committer for, has been nominated in the Best Java Enterprise Service Bus category. He also mentioned that Project Glassfish and NetBeans have also [...]

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SOA Tips: Favor Contract First Development (a.k.a. Top-Down approach)

Contract First Development is also called Design By Contract. Create the data contract in XSD and the behavioral contract in WSDL upfront. Use the XSD and WSDL editors provided by the NetBeans Software SOA Pack to do this. This approach forces the designer to focus on messages and contracts as the key concepts in designing [...]

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SOA Tips: The Wire Always Goes Forward never Back

If something goes wrong in a long-running transaction, you need to able to re-synchronize. The simplest way to re-synchronize is to do whatever you have to do and start over again. In some cases it may be some smaller fall-back in which case you can define the message to fall back to some intermediate restart [...]

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SOA Tips: Use Separate MEPs for Business Responses

The wire is peer-to-peer meaning that in most cases the individual collaborating parties are interacting in a peer-to-peer way. They are not restricted to some kind of limited client/server functionality where you got the big guy and a small guy and the small guy has different concerns than the big guy. Each element in the [...]

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SOA Tips: Message Exchange Patterns (MEPs) are the units of ‘wire’ collaboration

The units of ‘wire’ collaboration are the Message Exchange Patterns (MEPs) The most important thing to understand is that wire-design from an application perspective is made up of Message Exchange Patterns (MEPs) . These message exchange patterns are just units of simple message exchanges and are a way of incrementally shipping messages back and forth [...]

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SOA Tips: Use Correlation Values to Reference Shared State

Share conversational state on the wire using self-defined correlations in the message. This ensures that subsequent processes in the collaboration tail can correlate the response to a specific request. The identifier(s) placed in the Message Property of the WSDL can serve as correlation identifier(s) that tie together message instances with a particular conversation. To learn [...]

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SOA Tips: Identify Shared Conversational State Upfront

We like to think of the net as a RESTful environment that is stateless, but in reality, when doing eBusiness Collaborations we have to understand how to deal with shared state. The fundamental mechanism for referring to shared state is the conversational context and the business correlation that ties the messages together. In fact, business [...]

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SOA Tips: What is a Conversation in a collaboration wire-design

When doing wire-design for global collaborations, you have to think about how to establish Conversation. Typically in a eBusiness context, a single delivery of the message is not enough to achieve the business purpose. There is some interaction of messages involved between collaborating partners that ends up resulting in some unit of activity. These interactions [...]

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