Design Pattern Technical Details

The detailed technical objectives for the Seros solution strategy are presented below. These objectives provides an alternative to “SOA Monoliths” and embraces open standards, open source products, vendors that perform specific (but not monolithic) functionality, metadata strategies based on business domain vocabularies, and building partnerships.

SEROS Technical Solution Objectives:

1. Provide an open standards, web-services based implementation for the SOA Core Enterprise Services
1. Provide a high degree of flexibility for organizations to define, implement, and govern their SOA life cycle management
2. Provide a loosely coupled set of core services with a high degree of interoperability, composability, and Vendor/Open Source Product choices
1. Based on a repeatable design pattern
2. Prevent vendor and/or specific technology “lock-in”
3. Provide flexibility in making architectural choices and decisions
3. Provide both machine-to-machine (via fully described web services) and human user interfaces (via JSR-168 portlets)
1. Provide detailed definitions of the web-service interfaces to include the WSDL files, XML schemas, developer documentation, and reference implementations
2. Provide a reference implementation of a SOA Dashboard for operations management, service administration, and end-user access to services
2. Provide transparent precision search capabilities tailored to existing business processes and tools
1. Automated publishing based on the business vocabulary
2. Normalization of common search terms within vocabularies
3. Desktop search metaphors that work within existing tools to exploit the business vocabulary based metadata
4. Recurring search patterns with stylized search results
5. Search result relevancy algorithms that are vocabulary based
6. Transparent implementation of information governance/management policies
3. Provide support for recurring patterns of service composition/orchestration that can be parameterized and utilize the power of precision search for services and data sources
4. Provide highly scalable solutions that can be federated across large distributed environments

Seros has developed a design pattern based approach to realize our technical objectives and implement a set of Product Suites. Our design pattern is illustrated in the figure below.

Design Approach and design Principles

The standards-based, public web service definitions provide the power to the Seros product suites. These fully described and documented web services provide the commoditized, web service based interface definitions required to implement a robust set of enterprise core (or business domain) services while simultaneously providing vendor neutrality/independence. The web services provide functionality for capabilities such as: service registration, service discovery, service monitoring, service reporting, messaging, enterprise service bus, data publishing and transformation, orchestration, and many others.

The power of the Seros web services is realized via the resulting composability and interoperability of the commoditized web services. For example, it is now an easy matter to compose service registration with service monitoring provisioning; to compose messaging with enterprise service reporting; to compose messaging with transformation, adaptation, and automated publishing; to compose precision searching with authoritative data sources; to compose security services with both SOA infrastructure and business services; to compose SOA infrastructure services with existing applications and products; etc. Lastly, the Seros public web services provide the vendor neutrality/independence layer from the underlying vendor or open source products being used to provide specific functionality for capabilities such as: service registration, service discovery, service monitoring, service reporting, messaging, enterprise service bus, data publishing and transformation, orchestration, and many others.

The Seros design pattern can integrate a wide variety of vendor/open source products. These products can be individually selected based on factors such as: an organization has already purchased these products, an organization desires to utilize what is considered the best-of-breed products, and/or an organization desires to utilize what is considered to be the best value product for satisfying their needs. Additionally, the Seros design pattern allows for the incorporation of additional value-added features and functions that can significantly enhance each product’s out-of-the-box capabilities. Simultaneously, Seros’ commitment to open standards and WSDL-based service specifications affords Seros the unique opportunity to adopt new or substitute products as needed in order to meet evolving requirements.

The Seros public web services also provide a standard way of implementing human user access. Using open standards like JSR-168, a rich set of portlets are provided that present an intuitive human user interface. Additionally, the portlets access the same public web services. Therefore, both machine-to-machine and human user access is standardized and guaranteed to remain consistent. Because the portlets are implemented in compliance with the JSR-168 open standard, these portlets will easily compose into many of the major portal framework products being used today.

The net effect of the Seros Design Pattern is that it allows a SOA reference architecture to be specified via a fully described set of web services. Thus, a high degree of interoperability and composability is achieved between the web services. Additionally, the commoditized nature of the design pattern based web services provides a high degree of vendor neutrality/independence.

Download this document