Choreography & Orchestration - Difference

I have been having this doubt on the difference between Orchestration and Choreography for a while now. Learnt today that Choreography involves multiple parties while Orchestration focuses on a single one.

New Blog

I've started posting at the Integration Consortium's blog. Do check it out at http://www.icmembers.org/blog/zaki

How to improve ROI with SOA?

I was talking to a colleague of mine on using SOA in integration projects, when she cut through the chaff and asked me if we could show a better ROI when a project is done using SOA versus doing it "traditionally". Traditional means could be either by custom programming or buying commercial integration components/products, which would essentially be EAI. Most of the organizations are aware of EAI products and are engaged in doing integration using them in some form or the other, which leads us to the following questions:

1. Can doing an integration project with SOA get a significantly better ROI vs. doing it with EAI products?
   
2. In either case, do we need to optimize our business processes too to see a better ROI?

Any thoughts are welcome.

Few Minutes with Savvion Process Modeler

I played around a while with Savvion Process Modeler and found the UI (non-eclipse) simple and intuitive. Modeling was straight forward and in my opinion the tool should have a flat learning curve and keep the Business Analyst interested. On the negative side, the tool does not give an option to save the model as a BPEL file, by default, it saves the model as a proprietary SPT file and can export only to an XML file. It has got pretty decent features for running the model as a simulation with Normal distribution, constant and exponential values that can be given to the variables.

For execution, the SPT file needs to be deployed onto the Savvion BPM server (BizLogic Server) for execution.

Overall, I liked the product for its speed and intuitive GUI but was not happy that it could not save the output as a BPEL file.

Actional SOAPStation - First Look

Actional SOAPStation is a web services management tool with features for

• Security
• Failover
• Monitoring
• Reporting
• Rule based routing

All the features are configurable through the administrative console. Installation is straight forward and the documentation is useful. Lack of examples make the learning a little steep.

It has extensive features for security, providing options such as SSL certificates, SAML token and WS-Security policies. Monitoring of web services helps check if a service is alive using Hearbeats. Configurable alerts can be sent through e-mail or a MOM. Actional SOAPStation also has a comprehensive reporting feature that enables it to generate reports based on date, events and other criteria. Routing of messages based on rules is possible. The rules inspect message contents and route the message to the appropriate service that can handle it.

In addition to the above features, Actional SOAPStation has features for generating dynamic WSDL based on the operations to be made visible. This enables it to function as a web services proxy.

In combination with a registry, this tool should help in providing governance of services across the organization.

Java - Now Open and Free

Java is now Open and Free, things that a mean a lot from a community perspective - giving programmers who have benefited from the language a chance to give back to it by adding features/functionalities to it.

Also, it seems like the right time to go open, especially with several open-source Java projects doing well and more being announced. Sun gives the overview here.

Microsoft Dynamics AX (Axapta)

When my cousin mentioned to me last week about Microsoft's new ERP product called Microsoft Dynamics AX, formerly known as Axapta, I got curious to know more about it and this is what I found:

MS Dynamics AX is mainly targeted at SMBs (Small & Medium Size Businesses) and focuses on manufacturing and the e-business sectors. The USP for this product, in my opinion, would be the ability to leverage existing MS resources in the organization such as Excel and MS-SQL Server. Since the product GUI's look and feel is consistent with other MS-Office products, it could result in a flatter learning curve. A language called X++, similar to C++ and Java, is used to program the product. MS has provided dotnet integration into the language as an attraction.