Wednesday, September 26, 2007

SCA Like Features in Cape Clear 7.5

Building large scale SOA has several pain points. One of them is in the assembly and deployment to a SOA cluster. Cape Clear 7.5 is a providing a starter to graphically assembling SOA using Web Service standards and Spring. I got a chance to participate in the Cape Clear 7.5 webinar this past week and saw a flexible mediation development tool which in turn developed a spring configuration. Within the Cape Clear Studio (Eclipse plugin) environment, transports, transformation, logging, exception handling, routing and Spring Beans can be combined into an assembly to perform mediation tasks. The diverse transport selection and simplicity by which this is defined was impressive. 

A next step with this environment will be to apply policy between the steps/services. The final step would be in then being able to apply all these pieces to a diverse set of deployment platforms (both Cape Clear and non-Cape Clear).  Why would I want to do this?

Let me provide an example. One customer I work with has open source J2EE container, a COTS J2EE container, Tomcat, Apache Axis.... and the list goes on and on. Trying to develop a SOA in this environment is one issue, deploying to all these entities and managing this in an automated fashion is another. A single deployment description will help lead towards deployment automation as well potentially a monitoring description. 

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