ESB Driven On Demand Integration

I recently had the opportunity to talk to Michael Lippis of the Outlook Series about how SaaS providers are turning to ESBs to address their integration needs. The very fact that SaaS providers need integration solutions could be seen as a thorn in the side of their business models. Customers need their existing on-premise applications to exchange data with their SaaS solutions. However, they are reluctant to take on the overhead of solving this integration task.

Cape Clear’s ESB has been used many times in such situations and Michael and I discussed the JP Morgan use case. It’s a good example of how these issues can be addressed. Of course, using the ESB in this way changes the focus and introduces some new requirements, as I blogged recently.

You can hear the discussion here.

It's like a Press Release, but better.

I’ve recently has some small involvement in the creation of a few press releases. This really is a very formal process with many rules for how they should be created. Deviate from them at your peril. See for yourself with some of the articles that have been written on the subject. All these formal rules for such a short piece of text reminded me of how we used to dissect poetry in English literature classes at school. Each rhyming couplet would be analysed in detail until it seemed that the poem lay in pieces before us ready to be discarded in favour of the next victim of the dissection process.

Anyway - it seems to me that if we are going to put all this effort into crafting a short piece of text we could at least make it rhyme or even go so far as to produce a sonnet. Perhaps instead of marketing consultants, we should engage the services of a poet. The end result would be much more pleasant to read.

In the absence of an official Cape Clear poet – I’ve put pen to paper (with a lot of help from Trish) and rewritten our recent Cape Clear 7.5 press release. You’ll have to tolerate a Limerick, as a sonnet is well beyond my poetic capabilities, but I’m sure you will find all the essential information is included:

There’s a great new product I hear,
Whose release date is drawing quite near,
If you need mediation,
or on-demand integration,
The solution is here at Cape Clear.

ESBs on the Edge

Two distinct use cases are emerging for Enterprise Service Buses: firstly many organizations are using ESBs internally as the enabling infrastructure for their Service Oriented Architecture. The second use case places the ESB on the edge of the network in a role more traditionally occupied by B2B integration solutions.
This second use case is being used by organizations providing Web service interfaces to their business and in particular by pure play Software as a Service (Saas) providers who realise they need to take a proactive approach to their customers' integration issues. This may even involve hosting some portions of the integration solution on behave of the customers. An ESB deployed in a SaaS environment requires additional features over and above those of an ESB used internally. For example:

• Multi-tenanting support is fundamental to the SaaS model, but good support for it is not available in many ESBs. Hosting integrations on behalf of customers requires that data generated as a result of messages flowing through the ESB is segmented on a per customer basis. This applies to a whole variety of information stored in log files, activity reporting and data stored in databases. The segmentation of data in databases also applies to languages such as WS-BPEL which are heavily dependant on the persistence of data. The SaaS provider may need to make this data available to their customers in order to provide the same level of visibility into their integration solutions as they do for their core services.
• Scalability and Performance requirements for SaaS are typically more demanding than within the enterprise environment. The ability to deploy within a clustered environment is now a must.
• Productivity tools are vital. It must be possible to create integration solutions quickly for customers. Within the enterprise, an integration project might have been viewed as one off projects. For the SaaS provider they are now a normal part of providing access to their systems to each new customer.
• The software license model for the ESB needs to be consistent with the on-demand or per user billing model for the SaaS provider.
• The ability to deploy client side instances of the ESB is also important as the SaaS provider may not want to host all the integrations. For this scenario, ease of installation and maintenance is vital as is the need to work within a wide variety of IT environments.

Things I must do with Eclipse Europa

There are so many features available within the eclipse platform that it’s hard to get time to try them all out. However, the release of Europa this week provides a good opportunity to make some new release resolutions.

Start using the Eclipse Communications Framework.
It provides instance messenger inside eclipse and a whole host of other features to try out with eclipse: Skype, Bit torrent, peer-to-peer file transfer – I may never need to leave eclipse again.

Manage my TODO list within eclipse.
The Mylyn project provides a task list and task focused UI within eclipse. It’s time to move my TODO list into eclipse. Not only that, with all the recent talk of BPEL4People and the new Task Service being released as part of Cape Clear 7.5, I really need to hook this up to some BPEL processes.

Generate more reports
I just have to find an excuse to create some reports using BIRT. It’s an eclipse project that is just calling out to be played with. Just look at all the eye candy on their New and Notable page. Who could resist?

Upgrade to Vista
I know people will ask why, but I have to admit I’m just tempted by the new look at feel and it seems like XP has been around for ever. Now that the eclipse platform and some of the other projects are boasting Vista support there is no reason to delay.

Web Service Standards – Timing is Everything

The last few days have seen the approval of a couple of specifications; one is long over due and the other perhaps a little ahead of its time (the best time for a specification to be approved). On Friday the W3C announced the completion of the WSDL 2.0 specification.

Today, W3C has finalized a Web services description language with full support of the primary protocol for the Web, HTTP, and the most frequently implemented Web services protocol, SOAP. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 2.0 incorporates both the improvements for WSDL 1.1 found in the WS-I Basic Profile, and builds in inheritance, import functions, improved description of faults and errors, and full HTTP and SOAP support.

In the press release, John Marsh admits that “It's been a long time in development”. Given that the submission of WSDL 1.1 was one of the original WS-* specifications, we have certainly been waiting a while for it to be standardised. In that time the use of WSDL 1.1 has become widespread. A number of specifications have had to be written based on WSDL 1.1. These will now need to be revised in order to get the full benefit of WSDL 2.0. In particular WS-BPEL 2.0 and JAX-WS 2.0. So already we need WS-BPEL 2.1 and JAX-WS 2.1.

The other specification is WS-SecurityPolicy 1.2 which was approved recently as a standard by oasis. In some ways WS-Security and its related specifications such as WS-SecurityPolicy are ahead of their time. Most people deploying Web services today are only thinking about point-to-point security solutions and as a result are using HTTPS. WS-Security is one of a number of specifications that are delivering on the transport independence promise originally made by SOAP. It enables a whole host of security scenarios which are well understood by the security community, but are only starting to be required by businesses.

Imagine sending your credit card details to an online shop in such a way that only the credit card company could access them. Alternatively, imagine end-to-end encryption that provides a business with guarantees that sensitive customer data will not be inadvertently stored in log files as it passes through their systems. These and many other scenarios are enabled by WS-Security. You could say that as long as Web services are simple point-to-point systems, WS-Security is a solution in search of a problem. As Web Services deployments move beyond the point-to-point scenarios, the use of WS-Security will gradually replace HTTPS.