SOA Web Services - Patterns

Patterns

Patterns are based on the proven successful experiences of the past. The various patterns for e-business as suggested by IBM are shown in the following figure of the hierarchy of patterns.

These patterns are briefly discussed in the following paragraphs. We will discuss a few of the important patterns in the context of SOA in the next section.

Business Patterns

At the top, we start with Business patterns. These define the interface to consumers that include customers, employees, and business partners. The business patterns arrange the various business assets for the interaction with consumers. The following are the four business patterns:

• Self-Service
• Collaboration
• Information Aggregation
• Extended Enterprise

The business patterns provide the most abstract view of the business services to the consumer. They define the interaction between the various business assets to provide a very high-level view of the business service. These patterns are explained in later sections.

Integration Patterns

Sometimes, a single business pattern may not be sufficient to meet the customer requirements. In such cases, we apply integration patterns that tie together multiple business patterns to achieve the desired output. The integration patterns differ from the business patterns in that they do not solve a specific business problem on their own. Rather, they facilitate a more advanced business function by gluing one or more business patterns together. They also help in the feasibility of the composite patterns. The following are the two integration patterns:

• Access Integration
• Application Integration

The Access Integration patterns define how the business services are accessed and the Application Integration patterns define how the applications interoperate with each other. These patterns are discussed in more detail in the next section.

Composite Patterns

Composite patterns combine business and integration patterns. Like other patterns, they provide solutions to recurring problems. There can be numerous combinations of business and integration patterns used to solve a specific business problem. However, problems that recurrently occur across industries can be solved with the use of a specific combination of business and integration patterns and are documented as composite patterns. These are listed below:

• e-Marketplace
• Electronic Commerce
• Portals
• Account Access

For example, creating an e-Marketplace such as ebay.com requires interactions with a wide range of customers. Here, several business services from different industries need to collaborate to provide a business service to an end customer. Such business services involve auction, banking, shipping and delivery, and so on. The composite pattern combines business and integration patterns to achieve this.