Common Information Model, Bane for Service Re-engineering!

In this brilliant article titled "Classic SOA" Dan North discusses the technlogy agnostic way of designing services. He is spot on in his remark that the venodrs are making SOA look lot more complex than it actually is in order to sell their products and solutions.

He writes

"Naturally it is in the vendors’ interest to emphasize the complexity of SOA and then provide a timely and profitable solution. This leads many systems architects into a technology-centric view of SOA, when, in fact, the most important criteria for a service-oriented architect — before tackling the technology — should be a keen understanding of the business.

I am also quite impressed by his explantion on how a single domain model will make little sense for the consumer and the povider of the services and how it becomes diffucult to re-engineer becuase the tight domain model coupling.

He emphasises usage of "busniness concepts", an effectively higher-level, ubiquitous language that ties together all of the finer-grained domain models behind each service.

He goes on to add

"The service contract is then expressed in terms of enterprise-level business concepts, such as a vacation or a dispatch or a sales order, which again decouples the service consumer from the service provider and allows them to evolve independently, while still able to communicate in a common language. The mistake that enterprise information architects (or people with similarly named roles) make is trying to define what the business concept means to each of the people using it"

Sun Java CAPS and OpenESB

As expected, future versions of Java CAPS will include "OpenESB framework and components". I am quite interested to see how the Java CAPS 5.2 version will look like? I have been a strong supporter of JBI and have been using Apache ServiceMix extensively. I have to admit that I have not used OpenESB to the same extent. It would be nice to see, how the OpenESB JBI container and other JBI components will be integrated with the existing components like eGate Integrator, eInsight etc (From SeeBeyond acquisition). This will also help the existing SeeBeyond customers who are quite anxious about the future roadmap of Java CAPS.

In this post Sun's Fred Aabedi writes about the value add this will provide to the new and existing customers.

In his words..

"The merger of the OpenESB framework and some of JBI components into CAPS 5.2 brings exciting new possibilities to both our existing and new customers in the integration, composite applications, and SOA domains. A consolidated runtime environment based on the world class Glassfish platform allows the interoperability of our classic Java EE based components and new JBI based components. This combination is quite powerful and provides a lot of new options to our customers to solve their integration problems and build killer composite applications. Customers realize this ability to leverage existing proven solutions along with leading edge technologies by taking advantage of the Bi-directional Re-use features (JBI Bridge) that allow interoperability between the Java EE and JBI based components. In addition, standardization on the NetBeans 6.0 platform for all of the Java CAPS tooling gives developers a proven and effective platform on which to develop enterprise solutions."