Service-Oriented Architectures offer a number of potential benefits: They can
provide new opportunities to connect enterprises with customers, partners,
and suppliers; improve efficiency through greater reuse of services across
the enterprise; and offer greater flexibility by breaking down IT silos. But
these benefits make security more critical than ever. Why? Services are
highly distributed, multi-owner, deployed to heterogeneous platforms, and
often accessible across departments and enterprises - and this creates major
security issues for developers, architects, and security and operations
professionals. Fortunately, there are ways to make your SOA more secure. If
you're building applications to SOA using J2EE, BPEL, or XML, you can build
security into an SOA by addressing security throughout the entire application
lifecycle - not just at deployment time.
We'll ... (more)
Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are
the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the
right direction to start delivering on this promise. SOAs (service-oriented
architectures) promise to enable businesses to align their business processes
to customer needs, and optimize them to improve customer responsiveness and
drive efficiency. A process-oriented realization of SOAs is necessary to
deliver on this promise.
The process-oriented model is based on an SOA component model augmented with
an underlying formal model in w... (more)
LibGo Travel, one of the largest privately held travel companies in the U.S.,
provides vacation packages through its retail stores and wholesale
distribution channels to consumers, partners, travel agents, and stores. The
company wanted to expand its offerings by adding dynamic, branded, and
personalized packages. To help execute this idea, LibGo had to bring together
our travel partners, including airlines, hotels, and travel aggregators, as
well as LibGo Travel's existing heterogeneous systems environment. As a
result, LibGo's Next-Generation Travel System (NGTS) is among the m... (more)
Leading companies are tackling the complexity of their application and IT
environments with service-oriented architecture (SOA), which facilitates the
development of enterprise applications as modular business services that can
be easily integrated and reused, thereby creating a truly flexible, adaptable
IT infrastructure. Business process management (BPM) solutions such as those
based on Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) enable services to be
orchestrated into business processes. Processes built using a BPM solution
can be reused, changed easily in response to business ... (more)
There's a common misconception that Business Process Execution Language for
Web Services (BPEL) is useful only if all of your systems are Web services.
This article describes how Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) enables
BPEL to orchestrate nearly any legacy system as if it were a Web service -
without having to explicitly wrap or publish it as one. It also highlights
how JSR-208 will standardize this capability in the not-too-distant future.
Introduction
As Web services begin to take hold as an enterprise integration strategy,
BPEL has rapidly become the undisputed standar... (more)