Operations is my customer

So I got a chance to partake in a Franklin Covey Leadership Training exercise several weeks ago. I was not sure what I would take out of the training and whether it would be beneficial. I was extremely impressed by its content, focus and most importantly the instructor. Long story short the class tried to identify what is a leader and how to become an effective one. As part of the sessions a discussion around identifying your customer came up. For the current customer I am working for, it is a little interesting in that with middleware there are many customers. Specifically though once in production, operations becomes a major customer.

What I learned is that to make an effective middleware platform, quality comes in the flavors of Reliability, Scalability, Manageability. When these quality attributes skip a beat or fail to occur, Operations has to swoop into action. The benefit of the training underscored the need for me to develop simpler and more capable tools to handle customer issues. Additionally, the increasing complexity of our SOA has begun to exacerbate the monitoring and management once in production. Log4J logs, JMX and Management Services become the virtual console for operations and development.

While these solutions may not occur immediately, I am working with them to define best practices, provide training and eventually automate solutions. This has resulted in reduced operational issues as well as increased self-reliance. Most importantly, this process never ends and must continue to be executed to provide consistency of results.

SOA Training, what is it?

Based on my current role as an independent consultant I have run into several clients looking to develop SOA technical skills inside the organization. Due to my Web Services lineage, I of course look at the SOA solution set via the W3C and OASIS toolbox. From a training perspective I highly recommend the Cape Clear Developer site for two training facilities:

1) XML Schema / SOAP/ WSDL

Check out  http://developer.capeclear.com/?q=justenough

2) BPEL

Check out http://developer.capeclear.com/?q=bpeltraining

I am looking for some decent tutorials on XSLT/XPath. Currently I have been using the www.w3c.org and O'Reilly. If you have any suggestions on alternative tutorials/locations let me know. 

3) SOA Specific Articles / Books

Thomas Erl and his series of publications are a must. http://www.soamagazine.com and http://www.soabooks.com

Finally although not specifically for SOA but rather all the other technologies like  AJAX, OOAD, HTML etc the Head First series from O'Reilly is excellent.  

To Spring or not to Spring

I am trying to get a sense from people as to which framework people are selecting, Spring or EE5. Several different projects I am privy to at different companies have employed Spring with good success. Another colleague just published a book on JBoss SEAM with its EE5 underpinnings and is very high on its capabilities. Long story short it seems like this is going to be a Ford versus Chevy debate. Maybe I am wrong but would love to hear any feedback. 

Due to the use of Spring configuration and Spring Bean support in Cape Clear 7.5, I see my path has been pre-determined. 

The Web Service Standards Soup / BigSOAGrid.com

Over the past several weeks, a former colleague and I have put together a grid of the current Web Service Standards starting with the core and extending to the WS* features. You can find this at:

http://www.soamag.com/I11/1007-1.asp

or at its home:

http://www.bigsoagrid.com

The purpose of this is to highlight the many options / directions the standards have gone as well as the large amount of vendor participation in these specifications. Obviously having vendors write standards is a double edged sword as they most often will have an offering following the standard release and will be pushing it on you and I. With the open source movement however, you will find a bunch of these standards available in Apache projects, Codehaus etc and the time/effort spent by other technologists can save time for us all.

One example of this was a project I worked on recently for a State Government contractor. There was a need to support basic authentication and integrate this with LDAP. Within a half an hour discussion, the decision was made to use WS-Security UsernameToken. The implementation took advantage of the WSSJ package from Apache and in a few hours this feature was ready to test. The alternative might have been a custom SOAP Header and the resulting WSDL / Interceptor work to build out the infrastructure. Not worth it when deadlines are tight!

So take a look at the BigSOAGrid and get up to speed on the latest and greatest. Maybe you will find a standards based option for your project needs!

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. 

How does UML apply to SOA?

I am currently participating in a UML / OOAD training class learning about the UML language and what it provides the Object Oriented development space. A question that I had asked early in the class to the instructor was how SOA can take advantage of UML. Unfortunately the instructor did not have an answer with his background being in application development versus service/integration development.

So here are the diagrams we have covered:

• class diagram
• sequence diagram
• state machine diagram
• activity diagram

Still to go are:

• component diagram
• use case diagram

Based on the above it appears that BPEL could be described in a non-BPEL fashion using the activity diagram. An activity diagram could simply be described as a flow chart. It supports the definition of activities, looping, conditions etc. Sounds kinda like BPEL doesn't it.

Another diagram that appears to have some use is the component diagram. I am not 100% sure but the component diagram typically shows components in a system and how they interact with one another. Looking at Martin Fowler's publication UML Distilled (Third Edition), pg 141:

"Use component diagrams when you are dividing your system into components and want to show their inter-relationships through interfaces..."

Additional details in the publication and diagram examples appear to provide a way to visually describe a SOA where Web Services are the components.

I haven't researched this with other organizations but will trying to apply these prinicipals/approaches for some upcoming projects to help in the detailed design documentation phase.

Apache CXF, alternative to Axis?

Working on a small project with a startup and another consultant turned me onto Apache CXF (Celtix XFire). Both of us began looking at open source, specifically Axis 2 to provide a capable Web Service layer for an existing J2EE hosted application. After about a couple of weeks we gave up due to the poor documentation and issues that we ran into. We then decided to look into alternative containers such as Glassfish, JBoss etc and came upon Apache CXF. Some of the factors we decided on were a JAX-WS implementation with the ability to plugin into various implementations and support for the basic WS-* standards such as WS-Security.

Today I used the Apache CXF wsdl2java features to simply generate a client stub to a .Net service. In addition I needed to enable SSL communcation. From install to executing the client, it took 3-4 hours with a bit of debugging on the CXF client configuration file.

Current impressions are good documentation, clean generated code with no major issues.

Check it out at http://incubator.apache.org/cxf