Brandon Werner

You have to be impressed with Apache’s strategy and execution. Although many enterprise companies have stumbled or confused customers with their numerous SOA offerings in the marketplace, Apache has, behind the scenes, been dutifully executing on the core standards (WS-BPEL 2.0, SDO specification 2.1, SCA specification 1.0) that make up a SOA and plugging them neatly in to an overall stack. All of this has been accomplished while also removing any hype or marketing and focusing squarely on the technology and it’s usefulness. It’s hard to imagine SOA would gain any great credibility beyond vendor brochures if it wasn’t for Apache’s volunteers showing that.. yes.. there is real technology underneath the rhetoric.

This stack can be viewed in Apache Tuscany, which brings the SDO and SCA specification to us in vendor neutral Java or C++ and Apache ODE (Orchestration Director Engine) which uses WS-BPEL to execute business processes in an SOA similar to IBM’s Websphere Process Server, which I’ve written about here and here. I’ve done work with the Tuscany, including implementing it and managing it’s deployment. Aside from some problems with Websphere (Tuscany uses the EMF libraries from IBM’s Eclipse and Websphere products, so some library version clashes occur in deployment) I can say that it works as advertised and can handle a decent load.

If you couple this with Eclipse’s community contribution on the visual side, with a graphical BPEL editor and the SOA Tools Project, and you have a stack that rivals millions of dollars in IBM license fees for Websphere Process Server and Websphere Integration Developer IDE. Of course, all of these tools don’t come with support and are sure to need some hacking. Regardless, the future is bright for any size company wanting to leverage the best enterprise technology in an open and free development environment.

One of the new technologies I’ve been playing around with has been Project Zero from IBM. Before everyone gets too excited this software is not free; at least not in any way normally understood by the development community. Although the source code is available, IBM takes some time to explain what it’s use of the term “Community Driven Development” means, but it boils down to this: “this is something we’re going to charge for and we’d just like you to help out for free, please.”

From the About Project Zero page:

We are still building commercial software here, as the licensing makes clear, but we are doing it in a more transparent fashion. This transparency provides a way for you to influence the project much earlier in its lifecycle. It also serves a role in our notions of radical simplicity. Every discussion, every technology decision, the full history of this technology will be accessible, searchable, preserved on this site. That means that finding answers to your questions will never be more than a search away. Development means that this community is about the technology and how it is developed and evolves. This is not a product community. It is not the place for the finished item, but rather the lab where it will grow.

You could be angry with that, and it certainly leaves a bad taste in my mouth. IBM has had a lot of success moving technologies to the open source community, and they have received nothing but benefit as a result. IBM would not have the mindshare of enterprise developers it does today if it had not allowed Eclipse to grow openly and organically.

It has also had success including “torjan horse” frameworks in to Eclipse such as UML2 and EMF, which only see their real fruition in their pricey enterprise products for Rational, Websphere and to a lesser extent Lotus. If you want to see the true power and future of Eclipse as an IDE, you should look at what IBM is doing with their paid products. However, IBM has always been good at folding yesterday’s Rational release back in to Eclipse. For instance, Rational Application Developer 6’s amazing WSDL and Webservice editor tools has found it’s way in to Eclipse Europa as a direct copy, and you can find some XML editor features moving over as well. This is a win/win scenario that promises to keep both developers and IBM happy for a long time to come.

Yet it seems here that IBM has tried to redefine “community driven development” as giving software to developers to create buzz and get free development work from excited community members, and then shove them off like a birthing husk and sell it to large consumers for more than your yearly salary. If I found myself in a community like this, I’d move.

If you choose not to move any farther in to IBM’s work here, it would be understandable, but you’d be missing out on some incredible work. Why not just take a peak?

Project Zero: PHP with REST/AJAX

Project Zero is essentially a Groovy/PHP/Restlet/AJAX framework that tries the “batteries included” approach that Ruby on Rails has with it’s application framework. To be sure, there is a lot that a Ruby or SpringMVC developer will be familiar with when playing with Project Zero, especially it’s Restlet/MVC patterns and it’s scaffolding separated in to an /app, /config and /public directories. You can use Project Zero from the command line, but the real productivity gains are found in using the Eclipse plug-ins. You can program in either Java or PHP as nicely illustrated in the downloads page.

There are a lot of Restlet/MVC frameworks for Java, which is why I choose to focus on the inclusion of PHP. Simply put, it’s the fastest way for a PHP developer who feels the AJAX/Restlet/Ruby world has pulled away from them to get back in the game building quick and powerful AJAX/Restlet applications. This is all accomplished by the use of the Eclipse PDT project, currently in incubation, which allows for PHP development inside the Eclipse IDE. Project Zero uses this framework to give users right-mouse click control over their entire application.

It also uses Dojo as the JavaScript framework for AJAX. Why this was chosen over others I have no idea other than it’s robust support of file IO and other nice things DHTML doesn’t give you. Dojo has a pretty good following and shouldn’t cause any restrictions on what you can do within your application, although the version included with Project Zero is 0.4.3, which means you won’t get any of the goodness Dojo 0.9 gives you as demonstrated by the cool Mac OSX inspired Fish Eye demo.

There are many other libraries that you can use with Project Zero to build a robust application, assuming you’re using Apache Derby, that is. Sadly, although the software libraries in the repository are still in development, there isn’t a lot of juice in the batteries. Further, you can only deploy your PHP / AJAX applications if you have Project Zero installed on your remote environment and running. This means that those host providers who provide simple PHP and php.ini support will not run Project Zero applications you develop.

PHP being RESTful easily

Just like with Ruby on Rails, Project Zero maps RESTful resources to controllers based on names to speed development and reduce resource mapping. Therefore, the RESTful URL: /resources/people calls a people.php file in /app/resources/ that contain the following methods:


People:onList()
People::onCreate()
People::onPutCollection()
People::onDeleteCollection()


and individual resources can be specified as /resources/people/001 (e.g. id= 001 of a person in a people database) which have these methods in the same people.php file:


People::onRetrieve()
People::onUpdate()
People::onPostMember()
People::onDelete()


This makes programming in a RESTful way in PHP as easy as it is in Ruby, but without the language barrier.

JSON in PHP

Much in the same way that the SpringMVC framework uses HttpServlet to pass information back and forth to the calling application, Project Zero prefers to use JSON. This approach is nice since JSON has got a lot of traction lately from AJAX users who don’t want to wait for large XML documents to be sent across the wire. Project Zero exposes an API for PHP that maps roughly to the same HTTPServletRequest/HTTPServletResponse that SpringMVC and Struts uses, called json_encode and json_decode.

Getting data from the POST through JSON is easy enough:

$employee = json_decode($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);
$sql = "SELECT * FROM employees WHERE employeeid = ".$employee['id'];

and writing data in JSON is easy as well:

indexedArray = array("a", "b", "c");
$result = json_encode($indexedArray);
echo "Indexed array = " . $result . "
“;

Yet, this method of writing data leaves a lot to be desired. It would be nice if we could forward JSON data and then redirect to a RESTful view, the same way many other frameworks (Ruby on Rails, SpringMVC) does. It turns out you can do this using what Project Zero calls Response Rendering, which is a pattern of APIs to do just that.

In PHP this would be:

$customer = array('name' => 'John Smith');
put('/request/view', 'JSON');
put('/request/json/output', $customer);
render_view();

Wrap-Up

When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that PHP has been given this much functionality from a product out of IBM’s research. The question on my mind is if PHP even deserves it. Although many websites leverage PHP on the front end, it has always had a mixed history when it comes to separating presentation from the code itself, and is usually re-factored away as an application grows. Further, with Sun and others focusing so heavily on migrating Ruby to the JVM, it makes you wonder why IBM would choose to pick PHP as another language to do web 2.0 in. Remember, IBM made it clear from the above talk about “community development” that they plan on making this a commercial product, so it seems they have settled on Groovy and PHP to be their torch carriers with Project Zero. For PHP developers, they have been given a very powerful toolset. Shame they can’t use it until IBM decides to sell it to them.

My advice? Although large applications such as Wordpress and Facebook use it, for new development PHP’s time has passed. You are better off moving to a Ruby or Java web framework.

Below is an interactive slideshow of my talk given at the IBM Rational conference in 2007 entitled “From Legacy to Service-Oriented Architecture: The Strategic Importance of Services in the Insurance Industry”.

Synopsis: The insurance industry is one of the most complicated industries to manage from an IT perspective. Its complex and highly regulated business rules, as well as its early adoption of mainframes in the 80s and 90s, has led to a significant hurdle in moving existing infrastructures to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This session shows how the use of IBM Rational tools and IBM(R) Websphere(R) Process Server can free the industry from the complexities of implementing state specific compliance and business workflows through modeling and mediation flows.

This is a presentation I created to describe how SDOs can be used in the Insurance enterprise space to provide sanity in the large and diverse messages. These are increasingly being passed around as Business Objects in a Domain architecture as companies move their old object patterns to a service based approach (I refer to it as servitized business objects).

If you are looking for my particular experience on how SDOs and the IBM EMF framework that contains them works against the large ACORD schema, you can find my critique of Websphere Process Server and ACORD here and the SDO design pattern plugin I wrote for Rational Software Architect here.

Click the image to view this presentation interactively.

You may get the full version in Quicktime Movie format or Microsoft Powerpoint format.

I get a lot of emails about my critique of IBM’s Websphere Process Server, mostly along the lines of this email:

I’ve sent this email to you a couple of months back but didn’t get any reply. just thought would try my luck again…

we’ve made some progress with WPS and identified what areas are less risky so we can use at least some of the product features. we’re now building a prototype that uses mostly human tasks and some processes wrapped around them and we expose this all via webservices. there’s some pain around versioning, BPEDB queries, security, etc but at least we’re making a progress and early indicators seem to be on a positive side. we have had a couple of IBMers on site for a week and they helped us somewhat to rejig the design and focus on the features that seem to work and would add most value

still would be extremely interested to find out if you have done more with the product since you blogged about it

Well, obviously for competitive and disclosure reasons I can’t spill the beans on where my current employer is, what they are doing or why they are doing it. With those hand-cuffs in full public display, I will effort a more general entry about the state of affairs of this odd stack IBM has built.

In order to understand IBM’s approach to Websphere Process Server, you have to understand SCA/SDO, the unholy combination that seems to be driving the SOA mythology as of late.

About SDOs

There are currently three different implementations of the SDO spec, including Apache’s Tuscany (the one I’m cheering for), IBM’s from their EMF project for Eclipse and the interesting EclipseLink from Oracle and Interface21 (when those two get in a room together you should listen). EclipseLink is more of a consequence of combining SDOs and JPA, however.

I’m extremely excited about SDOs in general, to the point that sometimes I sit on my deck and dream about them. I even write presentations about their architectural implications. SDOs are awesome things.

They are, in essence, disconnected DataGraphs of DataObjects from some source. This source could be relational databases, entity EJB components, JCA, XML pages, Web services, or a combination of them all.

They can be acted upon and changed, updated and deleted, transformed, even serialized and sent to other objects and then connected back to the original data source with a ChangeSummary() to boot. For a more detailed understanding, check out IBM’s Introduction To Service Data Objects.

This is what they do in a nutshell:

1) You have data in any form from anything: Databases, XML, text, anything (or a combination of them).
2) You feed that data in to a Service Data Object.
3) Things can get pretty loose in there, so you can impose an XSD to define the types or just create the model on your own as you feed data in.
4) You disconnect the SDO from it’s source.

SIDEBAR: Last year I wrote a design pattern for SDOs in Eclipse’s UML2 framework that you can import in to Rational Software Architect.

Now you can do anything with this thing. Change the data inside, add more things to it, remove things from it, serialize it and send it across the wire, query the data inside of it, introspect it, combine it with JPA and tell it to save itself away from it’s source, anything.

Imagine the implications.

Design Strategy: Using SDOs with POJOs

No longer do objects have to have a strong contract, or any contract at all besides taking a type of DataObject. Your Business Objects can introspect the object itself to see if there is data inside of the DataObject it requires to do a task, do work on your behalf, update the DataObject’s DataGraph with new information (or replace existing information), and pass that SDO right back. The calling object can ask for a ChangeSummary() to see what occured to the data in that object, act on that data, and send it right along again to another object. When you are finished passing it around, it can immediately turn back in to the XML or database row it was loaded from.

Your Business Objects can change, the data inside your DataObject can change, or be a totally different DataObject all together. As long as the Business Object can query to see if the data it cares about is in there nothing about the contracts between your objects need change. Further, because of the API that comes with the SDO spec, your object doesn’t really need to know anything about the DataObject it’s feeding data into or getting data from. It can work with the part of the DataGraph it needs in a hands-off way and be done with it.

Think of it from a automobile insurance Use Case:

Say that you had a document based webservice that took an automotive insurance policy. This automotive policy would have an XSD that ensured it contained the data necessary for a complete policy. That XML document, once received, would be loaded in to an SDO with the XSD which would “strongly type” the data inside the DataObject that was generated.

Now, imagine this policy was sent to the webservice for a claim to be issued. You could pass this new SDO in to a “claims” system to be processed. The contract for the Claims system is just an SDO (type DataObject). The Claims system would do a simple XPath query, or do a get() on some data that it expected any DataObject that would come in to the system to have (remember, the data inside does have querable types because it was loaded with an XSD). Technically, it could even introspect the SDO DataGraph to find the data it needed. Whatever.

It would probably want to get Customer Information, Units Insured, ect. It would then do it’s own thing looking up the coverages, the limits and going about process to start a claim.

After processing, it could then append it’s update to the SDO by inserting data back in to the DataObject. The DataObject would then be sent back to the webservice, which would change the SDO back in to the XML document (again, the XSD ensures compliance) and sent back to the ESB or some other thing, but now with information on the claim that was created for it.

Now, remember that the Claims system doesn’t really know or care that the SDO is a policy. In fact, the SDO really has no type at all. You could have policy information, a recipe for Apple Pie and an iTunes playlist in the SDO. As long as the Claims system can get the right data from the SDO, it’ll work.

You could just as easily send the Claims system an SDO that only has the data necessary for issuing a claim. You could also change the Claim system so that it requires more information from the SDO, or writes additional information to the SDO (say requirements change).

None of this need impact the contract or the SDO that gets sent to the system.

So essentially, this is what an SDOs used with POJOs alone gives us:

• Objects are loosely coupled
• Object’s data can be discovered at runtime through query
• Object’s contracts are data based, no types or tightly binding interfaces
• Object is protected from contract and interface changes in system
• Objects can be placed anywhere - maximum reuse
• Object can modify it’s types and data structure during runtime
• Object has no restriction on the data it can share
• Object is decoupled from the format and source the data came from
• Object automatically can roll back to the previous data state or act on changes

This is just the impact SDOs have on sharing data between objects. SDOs have much more up their sleeves, including transformations and mapping.

It’s easy to see how this would fit in nicely to the theory of an SOA architecture. If you could just push around self-contained datagraphs of dataobjects, disconnected for their source, and transform them, map them together or change them in to other types of data, a lot of the complexity of dealing with data in an SOA would be solved… or at least abstracted.

SDOs and Websphere Process Server

It’s helpful to keep in mind that all workflow engines (WPS, JBoss jBPM, BlueSpring’s BPM) is a movement of the business logic and process flow from inside the code to outside, and that can only mean better flexibility for organizations going forward, even if current architecture design patterns regarding Business Objects have to change and give up their power or expose it more freely for orchestration (Fowler be damned).

The most intriguing thing about WPS, or any modern workflow engine, is the idea of visually managing the flow and business logic of services in an SOA. WPS promises to separate this orchestration from any code (save the code that it generates) and mix in human tasks to boot.

Workflow tools can be great when you have an Enterpise Service Bus or other solution where you have data flows coming at you from different technologies and different protocols that you want to feed in to a workflow. When you pull in a webservice or other Type that WPS supports in to it’s grahical tool, Websphere Integration Developer, it essentially reverses these data streams or objects in to strong types that are represented visually so that you have common base on which you can orchestrate, transform, and map the data between the various other imported flows. It’s easy to see how it leverages SDOs to do this, as it’s essentially what SDOs are best at. Mapping between these things and orchestrating them are easier if you have an abstract representation of the service or object.

The idea of building an entire enterprise from the ground up with this product is intriguing. However, I doubt that any project already in motion could manage to migrate from business logic in code to business logic in a product without significant rework, and the consultants specializing in WPS (and they are starting to emerge) seem to only have experience starting from scratch and in projects with human interaction. Regardless, this orchestration is most likely where WPS has the most benefit. It’s idea of transformation and consuming of the documents in the mediation itself is where things break down.

In Websphere Process Server, IBM essentially decided to use SDOs to parse and transform any data that comes in to their system. They coupled this with their previous Websphere Business Integrator product (WBI) for business orchestration of the processes that use these SDOs, stapled on an ESB implentation, stuck a feather in it’s cap and called it Maccaroni.

A product being a webservice de-seriailizer, data mapper and transformer, workflow tool and process manager is what ultimately makes Websphere Process Server the strage beast it is, and is also a major source of it’s problems.

In the work I’ve have done with WPS from a purely transformation and webservice flow standpoint, I’ve have found it to be slow but it works. There has been significant problems with the limited amount of flexibility WPS has in processing XML, managing messages and executing processes. IBM pitches that with WPS/WID business analyst or architects would be the ones that would do the mapping and process orchestration using visual tools. Often, however, we have been forced to fall down past the level of abstraction that WPS provides down to the Java code itself, which that is a sign of, if not failure, then immaturity.

Also, Websphere Process Server’s IDE where this mapping takes place visually, Websphere Integration Developer, is (since it is built on top of the Rational/Eclipse platform) hard for non-programmers to grasp; the idea of having to switch perspectives in Eclipse is foreign and unhelpful.

Ye Ol’ Impedance Mismatch

Unfortunately, even when you do go down to the Java level, things aren’t easy.

There are many times that what a WSDL specifies (compliant XML mind you) as a certain “type” and what “type” WPS renders for it are totally incompatible. For XSD:ANYTYPE, it dies flat out. However, so does any WSDL2Java tool. To combat this, code that was using the Collections framework has to be migrated to fixed length arrays so that WPS can interpret the output, as it sees any List as “AnyType”

Certainly, this type mis-match is experienced whenever one jumps from objects to documents in representing data (JSON anyone?), but that just points to the enormity of the problem WPS is trying to solve, and how trying to reverse XSDs without developer intervention is painful and filled with problems.

My Update

So, my update is that it still is not delivering on it’s promises, yet. However, I have heard from IBM that version 7, based off the Rational 7 (Eclipse 3.2) platform should be out in August / September.

I hope the reply was worth the wait.

The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) is one of the least understood and most powerful frameworks ever handed down to us mortals by IBM. Often confused with providing UML modeling capability in Eclipse and the Rational toolset (that’s actually the UML2 Framework) EMF concerns models in the meta-data sense, and is, in essence, an abstraction engine for data and code. The fact that Service Data Objects (SDOs), one of the two frameworks of the holy SOA stack (SDO/SCA), is built on top of EMF points to it’s power.

Sadly, most of us often encounter EMF only as some tool failure where we get an .Ecore error or some other nasty issue, and we usually reverse tracks instead of digging in to the mysterious innards of Eclipse. It was in this scenario I discovered a problem with EMF and Websphere, and I’m certain from the message board posts it’s gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets better. Luckily, there is a simple way around it.

The EMF Error

If you do any deployment on Websphere 5.x and higher, particularly it seems now that version 7 of the IBM Rational Platform is out, and use EMF either in SDOs or other parsing technologies, you’re going to run in to this error:


java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: resolve against non-hierarchical or relative base
at org.eclipse.emf.common.util.URI.resolve(URI.java:1853)


This is all the information you get, and it can be maddening. I was forced to face this error recently when trying to load in a xsd file in to an SDO from a relative URL. You can duplicate this problem by running the code below:

public class Test1 {

private static final String PO_MODEL = "po.xsd";
private static final String PO_XML = "po.xml";

private static void definePOTypes() throws Exception {
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(PO_MODEL);
XSDHelper.INSTANCE.define(fis, null); // In Websphere container this will fail
fis.close();
}
}

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
definePOTypes();

FileInputStream fis = new FileOutputStream(PO_XML);
XMLDocumentImpl xmlDoc = XMLHelper.INSTANCE.load(fis);
DataObject purchaseOrder = xmlDoc.getRootObject();

Of particular interest is this line here:


XSDHelper.INSTANCE.define(fis, null); // In Websphere container this will fail


Explanation Of Error And How EMF Determines Runtime Hierarchies

This XSDHelper simply takes an XSD (either String or stream) and prepares the SDO. In essence, the XSD gets parsed so that the SDO can apply the XML or any other data it gets to the XSD for Type validation. This XSDHelper is just a wrapper around EMF, which takes the XSD and begins to fit it in to a meta-model that Java can deal with. What is interesting is what EMF does under the covers, and for this we need to know about the URI class in EMF, and in particular the resolve method.

Recall the class we got the error from:


at org.eclipse.emf.common.util.URI.resolve(URI.java:1853)


The URI class in EMF is simply a representation of a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), as specified by RFC 2396, with certain enhancements. Like String, URI is an immutable class; a URI instance offers several by-value methods that return a new URI object based on its current state. Most useful, a relative URI can be resolved (that’s the resolve() method in the error we got) against a base absolute URI — the latter typically identifies the document in which the former appears.

It’s finding this absolute base URI that EMF is having the problem with when it says “resolve against non-hierarchical or relative base”. Why does it always want to resolve a base absolute URI? Think of the situation poor EMF is in when it gets a relative URI. What if your XSD refers to other XSDs (po-folk.xsd)? What if it specifies other relative links in relation to it’s own place in an heirarchy(../po-folk.xsd)? EMF can’t deal with that unless it knows exacly where it is in your filesystem or URI landscape.

EMF And Websphere

So, now we know how that works, but what’s wrong with getting the absolute base URI in Websphere?

Well, let’s talk about those “certain enhancements” IBM mentions when talking about the URI class. Even though you probably don’t think about it, almost everything you access in a Java runtime is some kind of archive, no matter if it’s Jar or Zip. Even if you don’t think your working inside a JAR, if you’re running an IDE chances are you are. One enhancement in the URI class of EMF provides support for the hierarchical form used for files within archives, such as the JAR scheme. By default, this support is enabled for absolute URIs with scheme equal to “jar”, “zip”, or “archive” (ignoring case), and is implemented by a hierarchical URI, whose authority includes the entire URI of the archive, up to and including the ! character.

If we would ask EMF for the absolute base URI of the po.xml file in a typical Java application, we would see this:


jar:file:/C:/workspace/test/xsd.resources.jar!/org/eclipse/xsd/po.xsd


This is the URI, with the absolute base URI being “jar:file:/C:”. EMF would be confident all things could be found in relation to this root location.

Now, what happens if we do the same thing in Websphere?


wsjar:file:/C:/workspace/test/xsd.resources.jar!/org/eclipse/xsd/po.xsd


What’s that? A non-standard archive scheme called “wsjar”?. It would appear that IBM, never content with being standard, has an archive scheme that is completely different from one if you were to access a Jar file from outside the container.

What happens when EMF tries to get an absolute base URI when it doesn’t know the archive scheme of the file it’s looking it up for?


java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: resolve against non-hierarchical or relative base
at org.eclipse.emf.common.util.URI.resolve(URI.java:1853)


How To Fix It

Now we know what we’re dealing with. How do we fix it?

Well, all we need to do is let EMF know there is another archive scheme it needs to keep an eye out for, and you can do that two ways.

At the command line:


-Dorg.eclipse.emf.common.util.URI.archiveSchemes="wsjar wszip jar zip"


Or set it up in your WAS configuration as a JVM property.

I hope you learned something interesting about absolute base URIs and stumbled upon this article before you shed too many tears. I don’t know why more people are experiencing this problem with WAS and Rational Application Developer / Rational Software Architect 7, but hopefully IBM will see it fit to provide an EMF in Eclipse that has these new archive schemas built in. Lots of headaches could be solved.

I will speaking at the IBM Rational Software Developer Conference 2007 at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort June 12th, 2007 @ 11:30am (BBT07). This will be the first presentation I’ve done focused on one industry segment, and although I know that IBM has purchased Webify for it’s Insurance specific stack, I won’t be presenting that but instead some pitfalls and good ways forward for moving from a Legacy environment to a SOA using Websphere Process Server.

When I wrote my piece on IBM’s Websphere Process Server and it’s purchase of Webify, Robert LeBlanc, General Manager of WebSphere, forwarded it to Steve Mills, and the sparks flew (RedMonk’s James Govenor confessed it was him who forwarded it on to Robert). I understand, given the large amount of interest in these products, why such a public critism would cause concern, but there was a fair amount of praise for what WPS and WID has accomplished in the SOA space, particularly in the important (and thus far in Computer Science, elusive) goal of making a visual BPEL/development tool. This presentation will be along those lines; how to practically use these tools to create an even more compelling architecture without too much Legacy headache using Webpshere Integration Developer and Websphere Process Server.

Try to join me if you can, and if you are going to RSDC 2007 drop me a line so we can meet up and have a beer.

As the year draws to a close, I realize I haven’t been conference jumping as much as I use to, but did want to draw attention to a few places I will be presenting sessions for. If you are attending, be sure to say hello. More information on times when it becomes available.

ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum
May 20 - 22nd 2007
Lake Buena Vista, FL
My Session: Future of ACORD: Using Data Standards In The Semantic Web

IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007
10-14 Jun 2007
Orlando, FL
My Session: Websphere Process Server and SOA For Insurance

IBM has just announced it’s release of the following tools:

• IBM Rational Software Architect
• IBM Rational Functional Tester
• IBM Rational Performance Tester

You can get a hold of these by going here. (developerWorks login required)

I will have my writeup of what I think here soon. As of this moment, the download servers are full and I’m getting a 44 error.

Much has been made about the purchase of Webify by IBM a few days ago, and for good reason. This is the first time that a large company has put it’s money where it’s SOA mouth has been all this time. Despite the enthusiasm such a purchase as created among the SOA community (especially smaller groups specializing in vertical markets such as Insurance), the bigger point this purchase makes is that despite all the marketing blitz and betting of the Enterprise Software market on SOA by large players, it’s the small players who seem to be doing it right. IBM, for it’s sake, has so far failed in it’s SOA products for specific industries, and it’s purchase of Webify demonstrates their weakness in developing their own custom SOA solutions.

Sadly, I have been in the position to experience this failure first hand.

I am currently neck deep in an Insurance SOA experiment with IBM as we speak, structured primarily around WPS (Websphere Process Server), SDO (Service Data Objects), Websphere Integration Developer IDE and all the rules engines you can imagine. In the SOA future, no matter what the business, business rules (BPEL) that drive the business processes in our environment will be the most important aspect of the Service Oriented Architecture. It is these mediation flows consuming and transforming messages on the ESB that give a large enterprise the flexibility that SOA promises in rapidly exposing and using services to respond to business needs. For an industry such as Insurance, the business rules and services are some of the most complex and highly regulated in the business world. In IBM’s SOA view, Websphere Process Server is the engine that combines Connectors, transformations of ESB messages and mediation flows all in one package. At least, that was the plan.

We were one of the first to attempt to use WPS in partnership with IBM, and we came in to the experiment with great enthusiasm. After all, insurance is a field ripe for taking control of complex business rules. However, some attempts we have made to stretch or conform WPS to our liking has met with failure on IBM’s side. This includes the following issues:

• Consuming SOAP with attachments to convert a message to a ESB compatible Business Object or SDO is not possible
• Consuming webservice messages not HTTP or other standard form is tedious
• Numerous .xx releases to WPS and its development environment, Rational Integration Developer, has been IBM’s usual reply to issues with service connectors and visual mapping of services to Business Objects*.

This isn’t to say IBM’s suite of products in the SOA space isn’t impressive. Their Integration Developer IDE, built on top of Eclipse in much the same way Rational Software Architect and Rational Application Developer are (indeed, it’s just a few extra plug-ins), is amazing in it’s ability to attempt to consume external webservices and transform them in to SDOs that are controlled through the use of BEPL through-out the synapse. The problem is that the technology isn’t quite working yet, something that is disappointing when SOA has already made such inroads in the marketplace.
To this point, we are scaling back our strategy of using WPS in our new SOA architecture until the product matures, a very sad real world lesson to the marketing websites and seminars IBM is currently pitching. Keep in mind we’ve not stepped outside of IBM’s technology ecosystem once so far, including using every single piece of Websphere branded application server and Component we can license.

Although I developed the architecture of the SOA migration, including an inventive strategy to wrap existing non-SOA capable services to create custom SDOs for our ESB (some of which is hinted at when I published my SDO pattern for Rational Software Architect), the primary pain has been experienced by our Integration Team who are trying to get Websphere Process Server and it’s various services to work according to our designs. It is here, in the constant PMRs with IBM in nose-bleed level support tiers, that we are getting the most reality.

Insurance, as I stated, is a tricky business to begin with, and IBM was right in realizing that when it came to this vertical market, it needed someone who knew what it was doing. However, given my experience with IBM’s SOA products to date, they are going to need much more help than Webify can provide.

* - “Business Objects” is IBM’s term for SDOs generated from messages in WPS. It does not conform to the idea of “Business Objects” from an architecture stand-point. At this point, we should probably rename BOs from Fowler’s viewpoint since it is widely mis-used.

As I was architecting some software lately, I noticed that the DeveloperWorks Reusable Asset directory had all the Enterprise and Security patterns, but the SDO pattern was sadly missing.

The Service Data Object is one of the most powerful tools in abstracting any data from it’s datasource, and is used heavily by enterprise architects and developers in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and in DAO patterns where you may have different data sources and abstraction is key. The SDO gives you built-in ChangeSummary ability, so that you can automatically update your datasource or XML with new data after you’ve finished using the SDO! Also, the SDO itself is serializable.

I am currently finishing an article about SDO and how to create a poor-man’s SOA from existing Business Objects using the SDO. Look for that somewhere soon.

In Rational Software Architect, having patterns in your Pattern Repository that you can drag and drop in to your Analysis or Design diagrams is essential to ensuring you’ve designed your own products correctly, and that you have the best representation of the pattern in your environment. With that in mind, I have recreated in complete detail the Service Data Object pattern here so that many SOA and DAO developers and architects can simply import it in to their RSA through Import –> RAS Asset and use it.

About The Pattern

I have included documentation from the ServiceDataObject specification Version 2.0 and have relied on several IBM and EMF document sources from DeveloperWorks and the SDO specification itself to create one pattern that seems to take in all the various text based and UML based examples of this pattern.

The completeness of this pattern is very important, so if you find anything wrong or would like to make suggestions either edit the included java file and send it along or comment to this thread.

This is an example of how it should look in your design document after you have filled out the pattern template completely and dragged the classes on to your design.

Click for larger view above.

Because of my current project name, the pattern will appear under Maestro -> Core Patterns, but you are free to copy / paste it where you like after import.

Download Files

Here is the Java file and the RAS file if you would like to do your own patterns or see how I made the associations I did above. To use the RAS file, simply do an Import... RAS Asset in your Rational Software Architect product.

1. ServiceDataObject.java
2. Service Data Object RAS File