Creating service-oriented flexible business solutions with WebSphere Business Services fabric (1)

About this series

This series of articles describes how to leverage WebSphere Business Services Fabric V 6.0 to build SOA applications that use composite business services. This series includes the following sections:

Part 1th: Business Services Fabric Overview: This section provides an overview of Business services fabric and its main components. We will examine the concepts of business services and composite business services, and how Business services fabrics can help you manage the lifecycle of business-level services and make these services simpler, faster, and more flexible to develop and deploy.

Part 2nd: Extended Ontology Models: This section provides overviews and requirements for the SOA applications that we will build in this series. It describes how to assemble business services using the Business Services Tool Pack and deploy these business services using the Business Services Foundation pack.

This application simulates a car loan processing system that accepts user details and responds with approval or rejection of loan requests. We will examine the traditional method of implementing a car loan processing system using static, hard-coded service bindings and process flow control logic, and compare this method with the Business services Fabric approach, in which you will use a generalized process model and a policy-driven dynamic business service assembly. You will also examine the Business services fabric Meta model and learn how to extend the meta model to provide the business context for dynamic assembly to Business Services fabric.

Part 3rd: Designing and implementing Business Services: In this section, we will use the Business services Tool Pack and integration Developer to design a BPEL process and implement the services needed to implement the car loan processing case. You will also learn how to use the Services Component Architecture (Service Component Architecture,sca) to leverage the dynamic assembly capabilities of Business Services Fabric.

Part 4: Assembling and combining business services: In this section, you will learn how to create a composite business service project that uses the SCA artifacts created in part 3rd to create business service metadata. You will learn how to create a dynamic assembly strategy and test it using the Business Services Fabric Policy Simulator. You will also learn how to catalog and manage services in the Business service Fabric, and how to export service metadata to spread to different deployment environments.

Part 5th: Deploying and managing composite business services using Business service Fabric: The last section describes how to deploy and test the combined business services using the Business services fabric. You will learn how to create and manage subscribers ' business Service licensing and view performance reports associated with business services. Part 5th describes how to deploy and test the combined business services using Business service Fabric. You will learn how to create and manage subscribers ' business Service licensing and view performance reports associated with business services.

What are business services and composite business services?

Business services can be seen as a business-level artifact, and business services can promote consistency between business expectations and IT execution when their potential is fully implemented. Business services represent business-aligned capabilities that can be adjusted for execution based on business policies and user contexts at run time. Key features of business services include:

Consistent with the service's business perspective, services typically represent discrete business functions (e.g., checking credit, opening an account)

Provides flexible adaptive behavior based on business policies and user contexts.

Derived from existing (and often heterogeneous) IT resources.

Build using technical and industry standards.

Through a variety of communication channels to provide.

Can be combined to create loosely coupled SOA applications.

Portfolio Business Services

Composite Business Services (hereinafter called CBS) are a collection of related business services that are incrementally instantiated to support service-oriented business solutions.

The CBS in SOA can help organizations incrementally automate and integrate business services on the basis of existing systems, business partners, and Third-party IT assets. CBS can help reduce the complexity of business processes by translating complex, multifaceted decision logic into policies. Policies are enforced at run time to adjust the behavior of business services to match the needs of individual service consumers. The evaluation of the candidate service provider functionality is performed at run time and the best provider is selected to deliver the requested service based on the business context and data semantics. CBS leverages pre-built SOA services and asset libraries to implement deployments in a variety of customer collaboration projects. The CBS approach supports an asset-based development model that is traditionally quite different from packaged applications or custom based application models, where repetitive solutions tend to evolve over time. Traditional methods lead to very cumbersome change management processes and rigid business processes that are slow to respond to changing business requirements.

The CBS approach enables you to use dynamic business services to transform rigid business processes into more agile solutions.

Some of the key features of a composite business service include:

They can be described as having their own business contexts, policies, and services that are described by metadata that can be annotated and published in the directory for easy searching, discovery, and virtualization.

Can be combined to represent a business process by combining them with services exposed from ISVs, legacy, third parties, or custom assets.

Subscriptions can be provided to the consumer as a personalized service mix.

Dynamic can be assembled and executed at runtime based on context, content, and contract to deliver a personalized experience to consumers.

Interoperable they can interoperate with heterogeneous systems and technologies using a common industry semantic set.

Governance and versioning can be managed and versioned throughout the lifecycle from creation to upgrade to the end of life.

They can be seen to provide business-level usage data to further optimize and fine-tune the solution based on changing requirements.

Figure 1 outlines how the CBS can be tuned to provide the right business service functionality and deliver it through the preferred communication channel based on the context, content, and contract of the service request.

Figure 1. Sample CBS Architecture

In Figure 1, the context includes the user, the channel, and the orchestration in which the CBS is accessed. Content is derived from the payload of the service request (for example, an insurance quote request). A contract is a business strategy that needs to be applied based on the context and content of a service request. For example, if a user is a proxy and is using a browser to issue a residential quote request, the business policy needs to be applied to ensure that the service is executed within 500 milliseconds, and if the channel is changed to e-mail, the service can be delivered within 1000 milliseconds. The same basic technical services can be used, but the SOA infrastructure can now more intelligently tune its behavior to handle requests because the requested business context is known and automatically attaches policies to describe the requirements and constraints for processing the request.

While SOA and CBS may sound easy to understand conceptually, in practice it is complex and difficult for most businesses to implement SOA and specifically achieve its main business benefits. Like all traditional applications, CBS must be managed throughout the lifecycle. Without the right SOA platform to manage the CBS lifecycle, organizations will continue to be struggling with the governance and management challenges of SOA.