Coordinating COTS Applications via a Business Event Layer

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Coordinating COTS Applications via a Business
Event Layer

• Presented By Maria Baron
• Written By Lemahieu, Snoeck, Goethals, De
  Backer, Haesen, Vandenbulcke and Dedene

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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

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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

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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

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Example continued

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

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Information flow in a telecom company
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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

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Potential Issues - Example

• People data storage person may exist in each
  functional domains 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

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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

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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

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Issues

• Abstraction level doesnt 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

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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

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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

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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

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General Event Dispatching execution scheme
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Business Processes

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

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Conclusion

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

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Questions???????????