The Adaptive SOA Framework pulls together several existing tools that were previously disparate and new tools into a single design-time environment for exposing applications as web services within an SOA environment.
In effect what iWay has done is to bundle its design-time tools on top of the web services bus runtime environment. This allows iWay adapters to be deployed as managed web services that are consumable by web applications.
iWay, which is a division of business intelligence software maker Information Builders, is calling them smart services since they contain multiple manipulation logic rolled up into a single web service that business users can readily understand.
For example, in order to publish a bill of materials from a SAP system, SAP exposes the integration BAPIs as low-level web services. But developers still need to figure out how to manipulate the BAPIs and in which order. A smart service pre-codes the particular orchestration sequence for the low-level BAPI interface as a high-level business process function.
Part of the SOA Framework release includes a new set of graphical tools that help users define and expose integration processes as a smart web service. The new tools are: Adapter Manager, Application Explorer, Adapter Designer, Adapter Transformer, and the new Trading Manager.
Adapter Manager is the run-time engine that orchestrates interactions between iWay’s 300 odd adapters. Similar products that are tied to one enterprise service bus (ESB). iWay, however, doesn’t have its own bus and relies on multiple third-party bus. The company says by supporting multiple protocols like HTTP, TCP/IP, and Sonic MQ avoids locking users into one messaging transport.
Application Explorer allows users to pinpoint processes in application to integrate, expose them as web services, and generate metadata schemas for transactions, or generate WSDL. Adapter Designer lets developers to define processes that can then be exposed as what the company calls smart adapters through JCA, Web services, or other messaging interfaces. Finally, Adapter Transformer is used for message mapping – i.e. transforming documents into an XML structure.
Custom code is the enemy across effective data integration, said John Senor, president of iWay, in a briefing with Computerwire.
Web services themselves don’t solve the [integration] problem if they’re implemented at too low a level since the responsibility falls on the developer to manipulate them correctly.
We now think we’ve created a fast and simple way to create smarter services which we define as a set of ‘super’ web services, said Senor.
To coincide with the framework release, iWay also announced a new product called Trading Manager that connects documents and transactions across trading partner and service channels. Think of it as a B2B partner agreement manager, said Senor.
The Adaptive SOA framework announcement was the most significant piece of product news to come out of the Information Builders annual user conference being held in Las Vegas this week.
