Service Composition

Service-oriented architecture starts when you create reusable interfaces to your applications. iWay Software's 300 + adapters provide the fastest, most economical way to start.

But what then?

SOA Effectiveness Needs Loose Coupling

Business agility depends on loose coupling among applications – the ability to provide services in which implementation details don't ripple through to the service consumer. Only then can an organization create a new application without getting bogged down in the details of, say, their ERP system's latest upgrade.

Open standard interfaces aren't enough. A collection of fine-grained Web services, in which each method represents an individual application function, is far too unwieldy to use in business process management (BPM) systems, composite applications, or portals.

For example, individual "insert purchase order into SAP" and "insert purchase order into Siebel" services don't benefit developers very much, because they still need to know:

• Which functions to call
The application-level requirements for calling them, such as metadata and security The order in which to call them How to manage transactions across SAP and Siebel

Maintenance also suffers, because developers need to change their new applications whenever back-end systems change. This becomes even more important as additional systems tap into these services.

Loose Coupling Needs Service Composition

Using service composition – the art and science of aggregating multiple application-level services into coarsely grained, business-level services – provides significant benefits for most IT organizations, including:

• Dramatically reduced development times. Without service composition, application developers and BPM users need to specify each service needed to work with every application. With service composition, users can take advantage of comprehensive business-level services that manage all interactions with all back-end applications.
Significantly lower maintenance costs. Without service composition, every service consumer must upgrade whenever changes occur to the service provider's environment, such as the addition of a CRM application or a data warehouse. With service composition, the service designer can completely change the implementation of a service without breaking any of the applications that call it.

iWay Service Designer: Rapid Service Composition

Service composition with iWay SOA Middleware.

iWay Service Designer, a full-featured service composition tool, allows service creators to compose high-level, coarsely grained, business-oriented services from low-level, finely grained, application-oriented services. Service design can include transformations, intelligent routing rules, exception handling, and finely grained service calls.

After defining coarsely grained services, users deploy them for exposure with iWay Application Explorer as iWay Business Services. In that way, coarsely grained services and finely grained services share the same level of reuse and other benefits that iWay Service Manager provides.

For More Information

No other company provides the kind of sophisticated data integration and SOA-based integration technology that iWay Software does. To find out more, call toll-free (866) 297-4929 or e-mail us at info@iwaysoftware.com.