Mohamad Afshar

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 most sophisticated booking systems that are currently being implemented. Instead of building one-off interfaces for each partner - a time-consuming, expensive, and brittle solution -- LibGo adopted a modern SOA with shared business services and Web services: data interchange would be XML-base... (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)

Supporting the Business Process Lifecycle Using Standards-Based Tools

Business processes integrate systems, partners, and people to achieve key strategic and operations objectives. Examples of business processes include getting and filling orders, processing invoices, reconciling shipping notices and received goods and processing insurance claims and loan applications. The Holy Grail of enterprise computing is adaptive business processes that can be defined, refined, and optimized to respond to changing business environments, government regulations and competitive pressures. This vision has followed us through the evolution of mainframes, Managemen... (more)

Best Practices for Securing Your SOA: A Holistic Approach

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 a... (more)

Going Beyond Project-Driven SOA

However, most of the organizations we've worked with are taking a project-driven approach to SOA - namely, addressing tactical integration and composite application requirements with SOA tools. So where does this leave them? Fortunately, companies don't necessarily have to do SOA for the same reasons, or do enterprise SOA. Each of us can do SOA in our own way and still benefit from it. How? You need to answer two key questions: Why are you doing SOA? This question isn't limited to those who haven't dipped their toe into the SOA pond. How are you going to do SOA? How are you go... (more)