Latest News from Mohamad Afshar

Going Beyond Project-Driven SOA

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:00:00 EDT

We often say SOA is a discipline in enterprise architecture and if you want to get the most out of it, you have to approach SOA from business, architectural, organizational, and technological perspectives. 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?

Best Practices for Securing Your SOA: A Holistic Approach

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:30:00 EDT

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.

Building Flexible Business Processes Using BPEL and Rules

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 19:00:00 EST

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 requirements, and enable real-time process visibility.

SOA in Action Case Study: LibGo Travel

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 11:30:00 EDT

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-based, and WSDL would be the single interface definition standard.

Supporting the Business Process Lifecycle Using Standards-Based Tools

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 10:00:00 EDT

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.

Process-Centric Realization of SOA

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

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.

WSIF & JSR-208

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EDT

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.