Mohamad Afshar

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)

Process-Centric Realization of SOA

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)

SOA in Action Case Study: LibGo Travel

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)

Building Flexible Business Processes Using BPEL and Rules

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)

WSIF & JSR-208

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)