Coordinating COTS Applications via a Business Event Layer Presented By: Maria Baron Written By: Lemahieu, Snoeck, Goethals, De Backer, Haesen, Vandenbulcke and Dedene

COTS Commercial off-the-shelf components Typically chosen for domain specific features Each application covers a particular functional domain How are COTS components/applications integrated with other applications? Typical integration based on one to one message exchange Problems? Abstraction level is too low to efficiently design an integration architecture

BECO Authors propose business event-based coordination Based on concept of business events Higher level units of coordination that enforce consistent processing in all participating applications Can be layered on top of existing technologies Still utilize one to one messaging at its lowest level

Telecom Example Organized around 4 business units Sales & marketing – set prices, complete sales transactions and notifies finance and service provisioning units of ordered products Service Provisioning – Coordinates the installation of all telecom services ordered and notifies finance unit of completed installation and customer service unit of installed configurations

Example continued Organized around 4 business units Finance – handles invoicing Customer Service – responsible for all after-sales service

Information flow in a telecom company

Example cont. Each business unit relies on COTS software from different providers Each handles its own functionality well, but the lack of integration and coordination between the standalone products is problematic

Potential Issues - Example People data storage – person may exist in each functional domain ’ s data Data will be scattered and all applications must be notified How to notify each of the apps? Requires integrated coordinated processing of actions among all COTS applications

Integration of Enterprise applications Typically integrate COTS applications enterprise wide Mom – message oriented middleware Applications interact by exchanging messages One sender and one receiver RPCs – remote procedure calls Represent interactions as procedure calls from one component to another One procedure caller and one procedure callee

Integration of Enterprise applications COTS Integration Integration brokers – evolved MOM products Enacts specified business processes by managing the desired sequence of message exchanges Web services using SOAP Represent one to one communication

Issues Abstraction level doesn ’ t allow easily for the design of activities that involve coordinated processing in multiple applications May involve a different sequence of events depending upon who initiated the process Cannon abstract process events from the notification patterns Ex: telecom company, purchase order Could use one to one messaging but would be intricate to design and debug

Business Events Defined as a real world phenomenon that requires coordinated processing in one or more application or component Atomic All parties involved may enforce business rules and constraints as preconditions If all preconditions are satisfied by the event, all participants process it Violations of preconditions should initiate a rollback of some sort

Component Event Table Event based integration of components Columns identify the applications or components to be integrated Rows identify business events Cells denote which application is involved in realizing which event Allows introduction of a new abstraction layer – business event layer

Interaction Stack Business event layer – deals with business events Notification layer – deals with one to one message exchanges or RPCs Event dispatcher – notifies participating applications by initiating the appropriate message exchanges and coordinates business event processing

General Event Dispatching execution scheme

Business Processes Feasible sequences of business events Separate the underlying notification aspect form the business process sequencing BECO decouples event sequencing

Conclusion Separation of concerns Highly flexible environment Allows for independent modification Can be extended to B2B event based coordination

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