SOA Patterns and an Enterprise Middleware Platform - a Winning Combination!

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) patterns provide structure and clarity, enabling architects to establish their SOA efforts across the enterprise. Moreover, these SOA patterns also help to link SOA and business requirements in an effective and efficient way.

Since service orientation has past roots in distributed computing, some of these patterns share similar attributes with distributed computing patterns and concepts. SOA design patterns also inherit concepts from other areas, such as object orientation patterns, enterprise architecture integration patterns, enterprise integration patterns, and software architecture patterns. SOA design patterns capture the essence of past best practices, solution design principles, and general guidelines to build efficient SOA systems. Even though some of the implementation approaches of SOA keep changing (e.g. the introduction of rapid application development, the importance of devops principles in SOA and gradual movement from a top down approach to a bottom up approach etc.), these principles and design patterns make a lot of sense when building small to large, simple to complex distributed and service oriented systems. The WSO2 Middleware Platform provides a set of loosely coupled, lean, open source capabilities that can be mixed and matched to build an end-to-end SOA solution. This platform approach means architects have the power of a range of orthogonal tools that support open standards to build their solution - the open standards based integration between the components is a strong arsenal when building solutions since architects can now bring in any preferred standard compliant component to achieve certain functionality, in line with an organization’s enterprise architecture principles. The WSO2 team presented a series of SOA patterns, aptly categorised as the ‘SOA Patterns Webinar Series’ in 2014. Each webinar in this series covered the definition and explanation of the said pattern, along with real world use cases, solution architecture principles, and examples on how the pattern could be achieved using the WSO2 middleware platform and its suite of products. This is just the tip of the iceberg though - WSO2’s orthogonal toolset means implementation of patterns are just a download away.

SOA Pattern: File Gateway

https://wso2.com/library/webinars/2014/09/soa-pattern-file-gateway/

Presented by Mifan Careem and Jason Catlin, this pattern looks at how a File Gateway pattern can be used to interact with real time and batch processing systems, by providing an intermediate file processing service between batch files and services. This webinar also looks at related patterns such as service loose coupling, data format transformation, service abstraction and technology and operational challenges in implementing this.

SOA Pattern: Policy Centralisation

https://wso2.com/library/webinars/2014/10/soa-pattern-policy-centralization/

Suresh Attanayake and Umesha Gunasinghe look at the importance of managing organizatinal policies centrally to overcome redundancy issues and inconsistencies and how a Policy Centralization pattern can help overcome this. This webinar looks at how the WSO2 Platform, focusing on the WSO2 Identity Server, can be used to implement such a pattern.

SOA Pattern: Legacy Wrappers

https://wso2.com/library/webinars/2014/10/soa-pattern-legacy-wrapper/

Chintana Wilamuna and Nadeesha Gamage explore the well known Legacy Wrapper pattern, as a solution to an enterprise which has large amounts of customised legacy code that cannot be easily modified nor replaced. In this webinar, they also look at common and popular tools from the WSO2 toolset for providing a legacy wrapper, including the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus and the WSO2 Data Services Server.

OA Pattern: Asynchronous Queuing

https://wso2.com/library/webinars/2014/10/soa-pattern-asynchronous-queuing/

As business ecosystems become more critical, real time and complex, users expect inter-system messages to be processed in less than a second, regardless of the complexity and distance between ecosystems. Senaka Fernando and Lakmal Kodithuwakku look at the Asynchronous Queuing pattern as a solution to this. In this webinar, the team also focuses on the pros and cons of such a pattern as well as the implementation details using the WSO2 platform.

SOA Pattern: Event driven messaging

https://wso2.com/library/webinars/2014/09/soa-pattern-event-driven-messaging/

In a connected business context, systems need to work efficiently with each other, responding to internal and environmental changes real time. An event-driven architecture for messaging provides a solution to this by allowing the external entities to establish communication channels to the main entity as subscribers for its events. Dakshita Ratnayake and Chathura Kulasinghe look at the Event Driven Messaging pattern in detail, along with a demo of the same in this webinar.

SOA Pattern: Compensating Service Transaction

https://wso2.com/library/webinars/2014/09/soa-pattern-compensating-service-transaction/

In this webinar, Nuwan Bandara and Nipun Suwandaratna look at different strategies of compensating transactions and how they can be used to recover systems to the original abstract states to guarantee system integrity. They discuss a solutions approach to achieve business integrity across stateful and stateless transactional workflows and how the WSO2 platform can be used effectively to achieve this.