TECHniquesSOA EnAblEmEnt EditiOn | iSSuE 2, 2009

webmethods Spotlight

capabilities of the product, but its service-

centric architecture was there from the

start – “webMethods B2B provides the

secure, scalable and robust service-based

infrastructure needed to leverage XML

vocabularies for the purpose of binding

business processes together over the

Internet.”

A mere seven months later, webMethods

B2B 3.0 was released. It included FLOW,

“a process-oriented language developed

by webMethods for visually linking B2B

services between business systems.” This

seamless mix of document orientation

(common in B2B products) and service

orientation (allowing basic process orches-

tration) was touted as webMethods’

competitive differentiator.

Let’s dispense with the history lesson and

take a look at what constitutes a service in

webMethods ESB Platform.

A service is essentially a piece of processing

logic that takes some input data, does

something with that data, and returns output

to the caller. Here are some examples of

simple services:

Take two strings as input and return a

single string consisting of the concatena-

tion of the inputs.

Validate an XML document against

its schema.

Transform an EDI document into an

XML format.

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Firstly, let’s not confuse Service-oriented

Architecture (SOA) with Web services. Web

services and the WS* standards are emerg-

ing as the de-facto protocols for imple-

menting SOA, but the basic concepts of

SOA are much more generic:

Technology abstraction

Inter-operability

Loose coupling

Reusable services

Network-accessibility

When webMethods began as a company

back in the 1990s, it had the vision to use

the web to integrate business processes

across company boundaries using standards-

based services to wrap internal systems

and exchange data using agreed formats.

It submitted a proposal as early as 1997 to

the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, the

standards body that oversees most web-

based standards) for Web Interface Defini-

tion Language (WIDL), “a Meta-language

that implements a service-based architec-

ture over the document-based resources of

the World Wide Web.” Sound familiar?

WIDL was a precursor to the Web Services

Description Language (WSDL), which was

drafted four years later.

In its early years, webMethods developed

the B2B Integration Server. Its first notable

release was version 2.1, launched with much

fanfare at the Gartner ITxpo conference in

March 1999. The press release focused

heavily on the business-to-business (B2B)

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10 yEArS Of SOA with thE webMethodS eSb platforMBy Jonathan Heywood, Product Manager, webMethods ESB Platform, Software AG

“Hang on a minute!”, I hear you think, “SOA has only been around for about five years, and even the earliest Web service

standards were not drafted until 2001. So how can you claim 10 years of SOA?” Well…let me enlighten you…

Service-oriented architecture

(wikipedia)

in computing, service-oriented

architecture (Soa) provides methods

for systems development and integra-

tion where systems group functionality

around business processes and pack-

age these as interoperable services.

An SOA infrastructure allows different

applications to exchange data with

one another as they participate in

business processes. Service-orientation

aims at a loose coupling of services

with operating systems, programming

languages and other technologies

that underlie applications. SOA

separates functions into distinct units,

or services, which developers make

accessible over a network in order

that users can combine and reuse

them in the production of business

applications. these services commu-

nicate with each other by passing

data from one service to another, or

by coordinating an activity between

two or more services.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Service-oriented_architecture

Nowadays, there is a lot of focus on the

aspects of SOA that make it work in a

large organization, such as governance,

security, process orchestration and compos-

ite applications. And this is where the

webMethods suite really comes into its

own. The tight integration across all the

products allows companies to leverage

even more value from their webMethods

service assets through governance (with

CentraSite), process orchestration and

monitoring (with webMethods BPMS) and

composite applications (with webMethods

Composite Application Framework).

In 2003, the webMethods B2B Server name

was changed to webMethods Integration

Server to reflect more EAI-like usage

patterns. As the market for EAI and ESB

continues to evolve, we have seen the

dawn of the next generation of our product,

webMethods Enterprise Service Bus Platform

(ESB). The webMethods ESB Platform

stresses its role in SOA enablement, integra-

tion and orchestration. The product has

evolved, but the core foundation has

remained the same. Our strong leadership

position in the Forrester Wave™ for Enter-

prise Service Buses1 (complimentary copies

of the Forrester Wave and other Waves

may be downloaded from the Software AG

website at http://www.softwareag.com/

awards) and other analyst rankings are

proof that webMethods hit the nail on the

head all those years ago. In the webMethods

ESB Platform everything is, and always has

been, a Service.

1 The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Buses, Q1 2009, Forrester Research, Inc., January 2009.

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to find the Software AG office nearest you, please visit: www.softwareag.com© 2009 Software AG. All rights reserved. Software AG and all Software AG products are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Software AG. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

FLOW

Java

C/C++

Adapter

XSLT

.NET

Implementation

HTTP(s)FTP

SOAPJMS

webMethods BrokerScheduler

E-mailBPM Step

Java clientC/C++ client

VB clientInvoke from FLOW

Adapter notification

Invoke Method

ESBService

Services may also interact with an external

resource, such as a database or packaged

application. Examples of these services

might include:

Read a series of inventory transactions

from a flat file.

Look up the SAP customer number for a

given DUNS ID in a database.

Create a sales order in SAP using a

BAPI call.

And, of course, a service may consist of a

series of other services to provide a more

high-level, business-like function:

Place order – consisting of…

Transform EDI document to XML

Validate XML

Lookup SAP customer number

Create sales order in SAP

What webMethods ESB Platform does so

successfully is separate the implementation

of a service from the method of invocation.

Pretty much any service, however it is

implemented, can be invoked using a wide

range of protocols (Figure 1).

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You can build a service in Java and invoke

it from a C++ client. You can have an

incoming e-mail trigger a .NET assembly.

And you can configure a received JMS

message to be forwarded to SAP as an

IDOC. The possibilities are endless. The

webMethods ESB Platform allows

Software AG to add more implementation

choices and more invocation methods in

the future. If a company has a service they

developed with webMethods B2B Server

in 2000 (before the days of Web services),

then they can enable that service to be

called as a Web service today with just a

few clicks.

With the intuitive IDE webMethods Devel-

oper (now moving to the Eclipse-based

webMethods Designer), even the most

complex of services and integrations can

be built without ever writing a single line

of code. Java services are typically only

needed for low-level technical utility

functions where FLOW would be too

cumbersome or inefficient. For the vast

majority of webMethods ESB Platform

customers, well over 95% of their code

base is FLOW.

FIGurE 1: ESB Service Abstracts Implementation from Invoke Method