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Oisín Hurley
, STP PMC Lead
Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles intended for use in the design of medium- and large-scale software systems. These principles include: development to a public contract, minimization of co-dependence in participating communities and diversity in technology solution.
The principles of SOA have been enacted in real-world systems for the past decade, but only in the last few years has the approach come to the level of prominence that has made it become one of the major trends in the enterprise software industry.
SOA adopters have taken to the approach for a variety of reasons, but the main driver as always has been economic efficiency. The architectural principles of SOA align well with the requirement to re-use existing trusted and stable software assets. Application of SOA ultimately leads to the specification and deployment of a community of business-value services, creating new and potentially reusable software assets.
SOA is an architectural approach which is technology-independent, but when a SOA solution is to be deployed in a business, it must be bound to a particular SOA supporting infrastructure. The contract-development approach may also differ, depending on what the chosen SOA infrastructure can support. Bringing a SOA solution from the drawing board to reality can be a complicated task, and tools are a vital part of the process. These tools need to be extensible in terms of their supporting technology, yet support a similar approach in terms of developing the key aspects of the SOA, such as contract and policy. Eclipse, with its focus on extensibility and community participation is the ideal place to develop the basis for SOA tools.
The SOA Tools Platform project was initiated to create a core set of capabilities that will allow SOA vendors to construct tools specific to their technology choices. Following the Eclipse method, these capabilities will be realized in the form of frameworks and exemplary extensible tools to cover the diverse aspects of designing, constructing and deploying software purposed towards the implementation of a SOA solution.
The SOA Tools Platform project has such a diverse remit that it hosts 5 sub-projects:
- The Core sub-project hosts an extensible assembly model framework, used to wire together and associated services and based upon the assembly model developed by the Service Component Architecture initiative.
- The Service Creation sub-project hosts frameworks and tools for authoring services and contracts.
- The SOA System sub-project hosts an extensible framework for deploying multiple services collated as an assembly to multiple runtimes.
- The B2J sub-project will host tools to translate Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)
to Java classes. - The BPMN sub-project will host a set of tools to model business processes using Business Process Modeling Notation .
The sub-projects come together to allow the development, assembly and deployment of contract-based services to hosting environments, such as JEE and JBI .
The SOA Tools Platform project is growing, with code contributions being delivered to the sub-projects. The next steps for the project encompass the integration of the sub-projects, based upon real-world SOA construction scenarios; the addition of new capabilities as required and the all-important building of a community of developers and users of the project.
For more information, contact PMC lead Oisín Hurley.