Service-Oriented Architecture - An Integration Blueprint

Service-Oriented Architecture - An Integration Blueprint

The Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint indicates how integration architectures can be implemented in practice. It achieves this by representing common integration approaches, such as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI); Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL); event-driven architecture (EDA); and others, in a clearly and simply structured blueprint. It creates transparency in the confused world of product developers and theoretical concepts.

The Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint shows how to structure, describe, and understand existing application landscapes from the perspective of integration. The process of developing new systems is significantly simplified by dividing the integration architecture into process, mediation, collection and distribution, and communication layers. The blueprint makes it possible to implement application systems correctly without losing sight of the bigger picture: a high performance, flexible, scalable, and affordable enterprise architecture.

What This Book Covers

Despite the wide variety of useful and comprehensive books and other publications on the subject of integration, the approaches that they describe often lack practical relevance. The basic issue involves, on the one hand, deciding how to divide an integration solution into individual areas so that it meets the customer requirements, and on the other hand, how it can be implemented with a reasonable amount of effort. In this case, this means structuring it in such a way that standardized, tried-and-tested basic components can be combined to form a functioning whole, with the help of tools and products. For this reason, the Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint subdivides the integration layer into further layers. This kind of layering is not common in technical literature, but it has been proven to be very useful in practice. It allows any type of integration problem to be represented, including traditional ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load), classic EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), EDA (event-driven architecture), and grid computing. This idea is reflected in the structure of the book.

Chapter 1, Basic Principles, covers the fundamental integration concepts. This chapter is intended as an introduction for specialists who have not yet dealt with the subject of integration.

Chapter 2, Base Technologies, describes a selection of base technologies. By far the most important of these are transaction strategies and their implementation, as well as process modeling. In addition, Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA), Java Business Integration (JBI), Service Component Architecture (SCA), and Service Data Objects (SDO) are explained. Many other base technologies are used in real-life integration projects, but these go beyond the scope of this book.

Chapter 3, Integration Architecture Blueprint, describes the Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint. The process of layering integration solutions is fully substantiated, and each step is explained on the basis of the division of work between the individual layers. After this, each of the layers and their components are described.

Chapter 4, Implementation Scenarios, demonstrates how the Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint represents the fundamental integration concepts that have been described in Chapter 1. We will use the blueprint with its notation and visualization to understand some common integration scenarios in a mostly product-neutral form. We will cover traditional, as well as modern, SOA-driven integration solutions.

Chapter 5, Vendor Products for Implementing the Trivadis Blueprint, completes the book with a mapping of some vendor platforms to the Trivadis Integration Architecture Blueprint.

About the Author

Daniel Liebhart comes with over 20 years of experience in information technology field. Since 10 years he is working in different management positions leading IT professional services or product development. His broad know-how comprises the engineering, realization and operation of complex and internationally operated IT systems for the Telecommunication-, the Finance-, the Logistic- and the Chemical-Industry as well as for public services. Daniel Liebhart is a passionate computer science engineer, the owner several awards and works as an assistant professor at the University of Applied Science in Zurich. His broad technical and business know-how is combined with a communicative and competent appearance.

Guido Schmutz works as a Technology Manager for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Application Integration and Open Source based development at Trivadis, a leading independent IT service company operating in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He has worked in the software industry for over 20 years, most of which was spent in software development and on architecting. He has led a wide variety of enterprise-level application development and application integration projects in a wide variety of industries. His current focus is on SOA and Application Integration projects using the Oracle SOA platform. Guido is also an Oracle ACE Director for Fusion Middleware and SOA Guido is co-author of the german books "Spring 2.0 im Einsatz", "Architecture Blueprints" and "Integration Architecture Blueprints and he is a regular speaker at International Oracle and Java conferences.

Peter Welkenbach works as a consultant, senior architect and trainer in the fields of requirement engineering, object-oriented methodologies, software engineering and quality management. He has more than 20 years’ experience of designing and implementing complex information systems for banks, automotive manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. For 10 years he has been a technology evangelist for Java technology and the use of the corresponding frameworks in customer projects. Peter Welkenbach is a course developer, author of numerous publications and speaker at JAX and international Oracle conferences. He has been using Spring in numerous customer projects since it first appeared in summer 2003. His current focus is enterprise architecture and lean architecture methodologies. In his current projects he works as an enterprise architect for a well known german retailer.

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