ENSEMBLE WHITE PAPER

THE TWO KEY TECHNOLOGIES

FOR SOA SUCCESS

Mike LaRocca, Product Manager

InterSystems Corporation
 THE TWO KEY TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOA SUCCESS

Introduction Concrete benefits from greater abstraction

Software services, in a service-oriented architecture Included among basic features, such as data transfor-
(SOA), can be used again and again in many different mation, asynchronous and synchronous processing,
business processes, making for a very flexible, effi- content-based routing, and distributed operation and
cient, and vibrant business and information technolo- management, most SOA platforms, including
gy infrastructure. Providing, of course, that IT has Ensemble, support Web services standards such as
the right platform in place for modeling business XML, WSDL, HTTP, and SOAP. And most, but not
processes and implementing the SOA. Using the all, support the business process execution language
InterSystems Ensemble product as an example, this (BPEL) standard for orchestrating services into busi-
paper examines two key technologies that are ness processes. These standards, and others, enable
absolutely essential for successful SOA implementa- software developers to express service functionality,
tion, but missing from most SOA development methods to access those functions over a network, and
platforms. business process workflow, in an abstract format
usable by any client wedded to the same standards.
This level of abstraction is fine for IT environments
Abstraction and Data Persistence implementing an SOA with new services written from
the start using Web services standards. But for most
InterSystems Ensemble provides a single, comprehen- IT shops, with a rich legacy of critical business applica-
sive, and architecturally consistent solution for devel- tions and data that are not Web services enabled, it
oping, integrating, orchestrating, deploying, and does not go far enough. It leaves IT without an easy
managing services in a service oriented architecture. way to bring the vast majority of its assets into an
Layered on top of the infrastructure you currently SOA and the business unable to reap the benefits.
have in place, Ensemble provides all the functionality And standards compliance alone does not isolate the
found in enterprise service bus (ESB) products com- SOA platform or the SOA itself from the effect of
monly used for SOA implementation. But Ensemble changing technology and standards.
goes further by providing two innovative and essential
technologies that should be part of any effective SOA What is needed is the ability to abstract and represent
platform – a comprehensive application and data the entire range of application functionality and data
abstraction facility, and an integrated object and meta- stores found in most IT environments into common
data repository. forms that can then be shared out in whatever format
is best suited to the task at hand. Abstraction reduces
Abstraction technology hides the nature, variety, and the complexity typically associated with integration
complexity of the underlying interfaces and data that projects (integration of services, in this case), enables
are part of the SOA implementation. The integrated incorporation of services and data as needed into dif-
repository, and the data persistence it provides, is the ferent business processes, and drastically reduces the
key to efficient reuse of services and SOA manage- time to deployment.
ment. With this technology in the SOA platform,
your IT organization can be assured of having the Ensemble uses the object oriented programming para-
flexibility to adapt rapidly to changes in business digm and abstracts functionality and data as a consis-
requirements and processes, and investment protec- tent set of object classes with properties (data ele-
tion through insulation from changes to the underly- ments that objects of a given class will hold) and
ing technologies and standards. methods (functions that objects of a class can per-
form).1 Such abstraction provides a consistent, unified
view of underlying systems and applications –
no matter what platforms, languages, data models,
storage architectures, network protocols, or other
technologies those underlying systems use.

1
See <http://www.answers.com/object-oriented programming> for a brief description of object orientation, classes, objects, and methods.
 Abstraction in Ensemble provides a consistent and
efficient object representation of different program-
ming models and data formats and a “universal”
or “global” view of all data and requests traveling
through the system. As a result of its abstraction
capability, Ensemble:

■ Facilitates rapid development of composite

applications in business processes through
Figure 1. Ensemble functional architecture. powerful abstractions of both logic and data.

■ Enables the latest development tools and

technologies to access legacy data and function-
In Ensemble, the product’s abstraction layer rests on ality as reusable .NET or J2EE components,
top of the connectivity and storage layers, hiding the Web services, or XML.
nature, variety, and complexity of the underlying
interfaces and data. Ensemble’s development environ-
■ Provides equal support for various technology
ment provides simple ways for a developer to identify frameworks, including J2EE and .NET, while
those capabilities and data that are of interest for a being easily extensible for future object models
given business process, and then transform those and frameworks.
capabilities and data into the Ensemble objects that
are visible to all components of the solution. As an Whereas Java-based systems have strong logic
example, consider a project that connects an SAP abstraction but weak data abstraction, and XML-
application suite, a legacy mainframe application with based systems have strong data abstraction but weak
an IMS database, a new Windows application that logic abstraction, Ensemble abstraction provides the
exposes functionality as Web services, a Java applica- missing dimensions required to consistently support
tion built using J2EE technologies, and an sophisticated business processes, which may include
application based on a relational database with elements from both types of system. SOA platforms
extensive stored procedures. Ensemble provides that are J2EE-specific or .NET-specific risk the need
abstraction in two ways: to “lock in” a specific vendor or technology, but
Ensemble avoids this risk by providing equal support
■ Within the Ensemble abstraction layer, the for various technology frameworks.
functionality and data in these applications are
seen as a set of object classes with properties and
methods. Ensemble shields business analysts and Persistence pays in the SOA world
developers from the complexity of the multiple
languages, object models, databases, platforms, In the world of SOA platforms amnesia is rampant.
and other technologies used to build and deploy With technology that has grown out of the messag-
the original five applications. This is “inward” ing world, many SOA platforms have no integrated
abstraction – Ensemble makes resources from and persistent data store. Messages are created, pass
the outside world available to itself. through the system, and are gone. Data important to
the entire SOA solution is held at the outer edges of
■ Once these external application resources are the environment, in the various systems hosting serv-
available as Ensemble classes, Ensemble can ices, and not readily available to the orchestrated
incorporate them into the business process, business process of which the service is but a part.
which can be accessed by an external client
technology such as COM, .NET, ODBC, Java, Some SOA platforms do provide for links to an
JDBC, EJB, XML, and Web services. This is optional, separately licensed third-party relational
projecting the Ensemble abstraction outward – database. But, besides the additional expense, using
making internal resources available to the an external database for SOA storage incurs signifi-
outside world. cant processing overhead for calls out to the data-
base, and for the mapping of multidimensional XML

InterSystems Corporation 2
and other data structures into and out of two-dimen- ■ Read-write access via objects, SQL, and direct
sional relational tables. Using an external database mode
puts performance of the entire solution at risk,
increases the complexity of the solution, and raises ■ Live-system full, cumulative, and incremental
management costs. data backup

What’s needed is an integrated, centralized, high-

■ Technologies for distributed data storage and
performance persistent data store to hold distributed access with full transparency
SOA data and metadata. An SOA without one is
brain dead – it functions, but only at the most basic Metadata is the key element enabling use of services
level, with zero intelligence. What is lost is a wealth within an SOA. We need to know what services exist
of data and metadata that could be used to make before we can even think of using them. We need to
development of the overall solution easier, and for know where they are, and we need to know how to
business activity monitoring, problem tracing and use them. We need to know how to string them
resolution, reporting, auditing, and other manage- together to model the business process. And finally
ment functions. we need a place (besides our leaky brains) for
persistent storage of all the data flowing through
the system.

Operational efficiency and awareness – Ensemble uses its embedded database for storage of
data and metadata storage metadata as well as transactional data, messages, and
other objects. This shared metadata repository con-
SOA storage requirements range from cross-applica- tains information about all the services and other
tion indices that enable multiple services to work components in the environment. It provides the
together, to high-demand information for which foundation for a common and consistent framework
relational database applications cannot provide for integrating services and data sources, orchestrat-
adequate performance. Ensemble addresses these ing business processes, and developing composite
requirements with an embedded, highly reliable, applications. With the metadata readily available, it’s
high-speed, persistent, object database. It supports possible to create a consistent set of interfaces to, and
message persistence, transaction integrity, event information about, each component in the SOA,
logging and tracing, and high-performance transac- enabling faster integration, rapid development, easier
tional bitmap-indexed data retrieval. management, and greater extensibility.

In Ensemble, all components of a given business Several benefits accrue when the SOA platform
process, from the process itself to executable code contains its own integrated data store. In Ensemble
and messages, are represented in the database as a these benefits include:
consistent set of classes, objects, and methods.
Because Ensemble’s run-time execution engine and ■ Efficient investigative and analytical
the database engine are the same, all components of capabilities through read-only access to a
the solution can execute in the same in-memory warehouse of messages of arbitrary complexity,
process for exceptional speed. with full transactional state.

The database embedded in Ensemble provides SOA ■ Highly reliable long-running business
solutions with: processes. Ensemble automatically stores the
state of all business processes executing. This
■ Highly-scalable storage of solution-specific data convention provides a strong degree of recover-
or indices, with built-in persistent storage ability in the event of unplanned system outages
capabilities or other incidents.

■ Scalability to tens of thousands of concurrent ■ Access to configuration data and other

users and terabytes of data metadata with the same reliability, scalability,
and performance advantages as the enterprise
■ Transactional capabilities, including automatic data within the solution. Metadata can be
recovery from system failures accessed programmatically via SQL and object
views, or visually using the Ensemble
Configuration portal.

InterSystems Corporation 3
 ■ Data synchronization using
simple formulas or lookups in
data tables (internal or exter-
nal), extensible to any degree
of complexity by adding cus-
tomized functions. Coupled
with Ensemble abstraction and
other functions, Ensemble stor-
age enables you to universally
synchronize data across the
solution.
■ Performance enhancement, as
Ensemble can cache copies of
frequently accessed data on
behalf of any part of the solu-
tion. This persistent cache capa-
bility avoids the typical bottle- Figure 2. Storage of every message passing through the system,
neck in integration scenarios – the need to and associated metadata, provides users with powerful business
access data inside overworked corporate process tracking, debugging, and reporting mechanisms.
databases.

■ Real-time data analysis. Ensemble’s

transaction-oriented bitmap indexing capability Conclusion
permits the rapid retrieval operations that are
essential to support business intelligence and Some SOA platforms are really just a collection of
real-time data analysis. independent tools packaged together and lacking the
integration necessary to make them easy to learn and
efficient to use. Others are integrated toolsets but are
Management hobbled by the lack of abstraction technology and an
integrated data store. They are inefficient develop-
Service oriented architectures consist by design of ment environments with limited support for the wide
loosely coupled services. Such systems tend to be dif- range of application interfaces, data formats, and tech-
ficult to manage. Asynchronous business processes nologies typically found in all but the smallest IT envi-
and message-oriented services make it difficult to ronments.
trace threads of execution, and therefore to debug
them. Persistent storage, especially on the scale and At the end of the day innovative abstraction and
scope possible with Ensemble, addresses this difficul- data persistence technology in Ensemble makes it:
ty. Ensemble provides a wealth of diagnostic data and ■ Easier to focus on improving business processes
the tools to analyze it in real time. Management
instead of which technology to use
features include:
■ Easier and faster to develop and deploy IT
■ The ability to analyze stored messages assets as services in a flexible service-oriented
(and other information) and trace message paths architecture
■ Message warehouse maintenance ■ Easier to bring legacy application functionality
into the service oriented architecture
■ Configuration control
■ Easier to align IT assets with frequently changing
■ Queue and process monitoring
business requirements and processes
■ Detailed event logs ■ Easier to work within your existing frameworks
■ Usage histograms and methodologies

■ More cost-effective and less risky to move to a

service oriented architecture
InterSystems Corporation 4
For more information

See http://www.intersystems. com/ensemble/technology/technical-docs.html

for Ensemble technical documents or
http://www.intersystems.com/ensemble/technology/demonstration/index.html
for online Ensemble demonstrations.

InterSystems Corporation 5
 InterSystems Corporation

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