SOA Reference Architecture

Recently the Open Group, which is an 300 member industry consortia devoted to the establishment of open standards, developed what they term as a SOA Reference Architecture. It’s a white paper that describes a blueprint for creating and/or evaluating a SOA architecture. I highly recommend it, and some of the things it touches upon are:

• Principles and benefits of SOA.
• 9 Conceptual Layers of SOA architecture, such as the role of service components, governance, business processes etc.
• Best practices for integrating middleware such as ESBs.

It’s an excellent document, and well worth reading the 30 or so pages.

Screencast Demo of Drools Flow with Apache Tuscany SCA

I’ve created a screencast that demonstrates how Drools Flow, which provides BPM-style workflow features, can be combined with Apache Tuscany SCA to create a very lightweight yet powerful dataflow orchestration solution.

Instructions for setting up the Eclipse project so that you can run the demo locally can be found at: http://d31rc4v2hihjuu.cloudfront.net/README.txt. The Eclipse project itself can be found at: http://d31rc4v2hihjuu.cloudfront.net/RuleFlowDemo.zip (the Eclipse project is rather sizable at 120mb since it includes all required libraries).