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