ESB For SOA ReliabilityESB For SOA Reliability

An SOA promises many things -- you can keep using existing applications rather than building them from scratch, they are scalable and robust, and, if designed right, should be capable of "on-demand" response to the needs of the enterprise. But one of the trade-offs of SOA is reliability, especially with Web services most often transported over HTTP. Although there are two new (and competing) specifications that are supposed to address this (Web Services Reliable Messaging and Web Services Reliability) most of today's SOA projects are depending on an enterprise service bus (ESB) to ensure reliability.An ESB is the "backbone" of your SOA, providing message reliability, exception handling, and publication-subscription model capabilities. Compare it to legacy store-and-forward middleware messaging technologies, such as IBM's MQ Series. An ESB also can serve as an integration point, offering multiple applications access to the same transaction across the enterprise.

We have a couple of ESB-related articles for you this week. The first one is a news story announcing the latest version of Cape Clear's flagship ESB. Cape Clear 6.1 now supports the WS-ReliableMessaging Web services standard and runs on Java Message Service (JMS) infrastructure software from a variety of vendors, including Oracle, Sonic Software, Tibco and IBM. The Waltham, Mass., company also licensed JMS software from JBoss, which Cape Clear offers as an option. As one of the original ESBs, the Cape Clear product is one of the most mature on the market. You should check it out. The second article is the really interesting one. Our Network Computing Business Applications Lab in Green Bay, Wis., provides our technical team with a real-world environment for testing complex, enterprise-class software. This week, we published a piece by Lori MacVittie that details the building of an SOA in the lab. Because the lab's networks and servers function as production systems and maintain databases that house financial, inventory, customer and order data to support a fictional widget manufacturer, Lori was able to do a real-world implementation of an SOA that included use of an ESB, plus a UDDI registry, and Web services security functionality. Among other things, Lori provides you with a step-by-step roadmap toward implementing an SOA.

Finally, we have a review of Systinet Business Service Registry 6.0., that concludes that the product eases the pain of managing a UDDI directory of services. A UDDI registry is a centralized repository that contains a directory of all services available across the enterprise, cataloged by whatever taxonomy makes the most sense for your organization. Many companies implementing SOAs are finding a UDDI registry critical for their efforts, but it is not an easy technology to master. Systinet's Business Service Registry can help you get there with a minimum of pain.

That's all for this week. Have a good one.