Composite Application With SOA, business services can be easily assembled for new "composite" applications instead of building them from code. A new form of integration that combines new code, or services, with pre-existing code or services without impact to the original application.
| Dynamic Orchestration An automated real-time process that selects services and defines when and the order that service actions are executed to complete a business process or transaction. A Rules Engine dynamically computes the best sequences of the methods to accomplish a business function. As new services are added to the business model, they are described inside of the metadata repository and made available to the rules engine. |
ETL ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. A process in data warehousing that extracts data from outside sources, transforms it to fit business needs, and loads it into the data warehouse. Data is always loaded into a data warehouse, whereas ETL describes process that loads any database. It can be used in a SOA environment to provide data to be used by services.
| Metadata Metadata is data about data; where that data is located and what it is used for. A good analogy is that of a library catalog card which contains data about the nature and location of a book. Defining metadata is required as the first step in dynamic orchestration; descriptions are done in a Metadata repository. Metadata is the complete description of the services and how data is manipulated in the data model and enables the creation of sequences to services calls. |
Orchestration Defines the way actions that access services are chained together to execute a business process to request information or process a transaction. First generation orchestration tools rely on static workflow or specific languages like BPEL that must be defined during programming.
| Service An executable piece of software that can be accessed by other services or applications. Business services represent an action, or a combination of actions that process requests or complete business transactions. The service user can access it without any knowledge at runtime. Business services are manipulated through a set of exposed interface definitions called methods. |
Workflow The event-driven operation of a work procedure that defines
- how services are structured,
- who performs them,
- their relative order,
- how they are synchronised,
- how information flows, &
- how services are being tracked.
Traditionally built through a graphical tool linking a chain of services to be used for a business application. Workflow-based applications are hard-coded and provide a static approach to the execution of a chain of services. | Transaction A type of processing in which the computer responds immediately to user requests (like an ATM). Each request is a transaction. The opposite of batch processing in which requests are stored and executed all at once. There are four properties of an enterprise-level transaction:
- Atomicity: a transaction should be done or undone completely. In the event of a failure, all data rolls back to previous state.
- Consistency: a transaction should transform a system from one consistent state to another.
- Isolation: each transaction should happen independently of others occurring at the same time.
- Durability: Completed transactions should remain permanent, even during system failure.
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Service Mapping A process to define the relationship between the application objects and the corresponding services to be used when the application is executed. Mapping can be done through a programming interface or a graphical mapping tool.
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