From time to time, we can witness paradigm changes in the field of application development and integration, this was the case when the service-oriented architecture (SOA) model was launched. The main idea of SOA is that the developer creates services – instead of monolith applications –, which are also viable on their own, and he publishes them on one service bus. Other developers within the organization can deploy these unique services as already existing features and can build up their own, maybe higher level services, which they also publish – explains Iván Péter Ertner, IT Architect of Alerant Informatikai Rt.

Framework systems and access rights
The necessary tools required for development in accord with the above-described principles have been missing so far, therefore BEA was the first in the industry to develop a new application package – this is AquaLogic –, with which SOA-based operation environments can be built smoothly. Currently four products are included in the package: AquaLogic Service Bus, AquaLogic Data Services Platform, AquaLogic Enterprise Security and AquaLogic Service Registry.

AquaLogic Data Services Platform
This is a framework system and a collection of communication platforms, which allows data captured from different sources and in different format to be viewed and processed on a uniform platform in an online manner. From the registered data sources via a graphical platform we can build inquiries worded in a standard language (XQuery) – spanned across several data sources – of which the result is displayed as XML data source. The inquiries may include aggregation elements, numeric, date-and text operations or programmed functions as well.

AquaLogic Enterprise Security
This is an application-and resource level authorization and access right handling infrastructure: distributed security infrastructure items and services become securely usable and reutilizable across the whole heterogeneous enterprise environment. The purpose is that authorization related information and algorithms should not remain hidden in the applications, should not be scattered on different servers or databases, but become collectable and uniformly manageable on one server. Authorizations can be also inquired on via a Web service interface.

Service bus and registration

AquaLogic Service Bus
This is maybe the most important element of the product group, most commonly considered as Web service container. Positioned in the kernel of the entire enterprise infrastructure, background services are called in via this. The service bus checks where the given service is located and via which platform it can be accessed. Given its good monitoring capability, it is possible to continuously keep track of business service operation related statistics (how many times the given service ran, which systems it affected, etc.). Its authorization management feature cooperates with AquaLogic Enterprise Security (for instance it can be defined what services a particular user can have access to). The tool provides dynamic route selection, furthermore conversion and routing between Web service messages, as well as it performs transformation through such a metadata-driven configuration, which facilitates changes to be easily implemented.

AquaLogic Service Registry
The fourth element of AquaLogic product family is a business service registry program, which provides the foundation for service-oriented architecture management and lifecycle management. It operates with standard mechanism and fully supports the latest UDDI V3 specification. With its support, a detailed description of enterprise business services and information regarding their utilization can be captured into one centrally managed, reliable, searchable location (Business Service Console), which finally becomes the easily accessible registry of all SOA data.