Service Engineering and Management

Business Service Integration and Management

Business Service Integration.

Technical background
Anca Daniela Ionita
Universitatea Politehnica din Bucureşti

Program Strategic pentru Promovarea Inovarii în Servicii prin

Educaţie Deschisă, Continuă (INSEED)
POSDRU/86/1.2./S/57748
Proiect cofinanţat din Fondul Social European prin Programul
Operaţional Sectorial Dezvoltarea Resurselor Umane 2007-2013
 Summary

‰ A History of Integration.
Platforms and Technologies
‰ Software services
ƒ The landscape of software reuse
ƒ Characteristics of software services
‰ Service Integration
ƒ Glossary related to software integration
ƒ Service orchestration with business
processes

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 Platforms and technologies
evolution

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 Mainframes era
• Period: 60s
• Platform: mainframes
• Integration degree: islands of data
• Integration process:
– Data collection - on paper
– Data input – punched cards – operated by dedicated personnel
– Batch processing - sequential
• Users: several employees
• Organization structure: data processing sub-department, part of
Accounting department
– resources 6% (equipment and scheduling 2% )
• Integration problems:
– Interdependency between applications
– Consistency maintenance

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 Terminals era
• Period: 70s, the beginning of 80s
• Platforms: mainframes with data bases and transaction processing + green screen
terminal, fast access disks, networks
• Integration degree:
– integrate data islands
– isolate programs from physical data storage
• Integration process:
– on-line access to information (real time) – up-to-date reports
– direct access for introducing data
• Users: multiple employees (sailing assistants, data input operators, schedulers,
retailers)
• Organization structure: special department for information systems,
subordinated to the executive manager
– The chief of IS department has a key position in enterprise management
– 10% of the budget
• Integration problems:
– Data integration at department level (at a low scale)
– Primitive integration of data bases
– Part of the applications are sequential, remained from the mainframe era

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 PC era
• Period: middle of 80s
• Platforms: mainframes + PCs for terminals
• Integration Degree: - copy-paste integration,
- PC applications cannot be integrated with enterprise data bases
• Integration Process:
– Using PCs for connecting to mainframes
– Write simple local applications on PC - Based on Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE, WordStar etc.
- Assisted by the information department

• Organization structure: Information systems departament – 15%

• Users: users become developers
• Integration problems:
– New requirements for graphical interphaces
– Necessity to connect PCs through local networks
– Necessity to integrate enterprise applications

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 Client – server era
• Period: 90s
• Platforms: server on mainframes, clients on PC; later, everything on PC
• Integration process:
– Local processing increased
– Data from server used non-continuously

• Integration degree: Monolithic, thin client, thick client, 3-Tier

• Organization structure: at the beginning 10% of programmers could
implement client-server applications; then it became more accessible
• Users: users become developers
• Integration problems:
– Deployment difficulties: server location fixed for the client (hard-coded)
– Data replication problems (consistency problems, as in terminals era)

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 Distributed processing era
• Client – server – starting with the 90s
• Commercial applications - late 80s - Ready-made applications
for various business domains – replace in-house applications
– Problem: heterogeneous technological platforms
• Delocalization to a third party – 90s
– Data management - reduce IT personnel
– Application / component development - reduce costs
– Problems: write detailed specifications
• Application integration – late 90s
– Identification, management and integration of business processes /
heterogeneous platforms
– EAI (Enterprise Application Integration)
– Solutions: adoption of the process perspective, industrial standards, Web
technologies
– Problems: multiple platforms, server to server
connectivity, standardization

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 Service era
• Period: years 2000
• Platforms: heterogeneous, connectivity through Internet, Intranet,
service oriented architectures
• Integration degree:
– Low coupled services, which interact by interchanging messages – well
defined protocols, SLA (Service Level Agreement) contracts
• Integration process:
– Dynamic definition and management
– Systems for business process management
• Organization structure: cooperation of multiple enterprises
• Users: diversification, increased number of users –WWW access
• Integration problems:
– Security, versioning, cache, deployment, management
– Problems from client-server era are amplified.

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 Summary

‰ A History of Integration.
Platforms and Technologies
‰ Software services
ƒ The landscape of software reuse
ƒ Characteristics of software services
‰ Service Integration
ƒ Glossary related to software integration
ƒ Service orchestration with business
processes

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 The landscape of software
reuse
Libraries Component-based
Configurable applications Software development
Frameworks
Service-oriented
Wrapping legacy applications systems
COTS (Components Off The Shelf)
Product lines

Aspect-oriented software development

Design patterns
Program generators

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 Example: Weather info - scenario1

Leaving the site !

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 Example: Weather info - scenario 2

Information
supplied by INMH

Web services

NOT leaving the site !

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 Software services
• Characteristics
– May be executed on different computers, from various service
providers
– Supplied locally or externalized
– May be implemented in any pogramming language
– May embed legacy systems of various organizations

• Differences in respect with software components

– The service is independent
– It uses a communication based on XML messages.

• Involved actors
– Service providers
– Clients (discover, request and use services)
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 Web service Standards

• WSDL (Web Service Definition Language)

– Defines the abstract interface and the binding to the
concrete implementation
• UDDI (Universal Descriptor, Discovery and
Integration)
– Defines the specification of a service that can be used
for its discovery
• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
– standard for interchanging messages – service
communication

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 Summary

‰ A History of Integration.
Platforms and Technologies
‰ Software services
ƒ The landscape of software reuse
ƒ Characteristics of software services
‰ Service Integration
ƒ Glossary related to software integration
ƒ Service orchestration with business
processes

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Glossary for software integration

‰ Composition
‰ Creating software by assembling software
artifacts / elements

‰ Integration
‰ Assembling software systems that already exist
autonomously, for developing new software

‰ Interoperability

‰ Communicating, exchanging data and

cooperating between software artifacts entire
software systems, possibly deployed on
different nodes

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Glossary for software integration

‰ Collaboration
‰ Work together for a common purpose, by
sharing data, documents, software artifacts
and work spaces
‰ Coordination
‰ Manage the interaction inside a collaboration
at a central level
‰ Service orchestration
‰ Define flows of services according to a
predefined pattern and execute them
accordingly. The orchestration can be
performed with workflows and business
processes.
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 Service orchestration
‰ There is an executable business process, which is able to interact
with services – available inside or outside the system.

‰ The process represents the perspective of a single business partner.

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 Multiple layers for service
orchestration

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 References
• Jan Sommerville, Software Engineering, 8th Edition,
Pearson Education, 2006
• J. Greenfield, K. Short, Software Factories: Assembling
Applications with Pattern, Models, Frameworks, and
Tools, Wiley Publishing, 2004
• Anca Daniela Ionita, Jacky Estublier, “Business Process
Modeling and Automation with General and Domain
Specific Languages”, in Jason A. Beckmann Ed.,
Business Process Modeling: Software Engineering,
Analysis and Applications, Nova Publishers, 2011

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