SOA Tools

Let us now outline the features of some of the different kinds of SOA tools and Web services technologies presented in the forgoing SOA Versioning tutorials.

SOA Tools: Web Service Management Intermediary

The first of the SOA tools presented in the case studies was the Web service management intermediary. The Progress Actional SOAPstation product is an example of that tool. Three specific versioning challenges that SOAPstation solves are:

  • SOAPstation provides backward compatibility without coding
  • SOAPstation helps synchronize the load transfer in data migrations so the load can be moved from one version of a service in conjunction with whichever method of data migration is selected
  • SOAPstation provides precise, predictable control of load transfer. In a data migration, the load can be moved -- while at the same time it is easy to know exactly when and which load set is moving over to the new version of the service

SOA tools include: Web service management intermediaries, SOA management solutions and registries

SOA tools include: Web service management intermediaries, SOA management solutions and registries

SOA Tools: SOA Management

The second category of SOA tools is SOA management. These tools include solutions such as Progress Actional's Looking Glass. The two features that these solutions have that are particularly effective for versioning are:

  • The automatic discovery of services, consumers and interdependencies -- even for items that people never added to the registry in the first place
  • The capacity to track the actual usage of services and the versions of services on a consumer-by-consumer basis -- so it is possible to know which consumers are using which version of a service: when and how.

SOA Tools: Why Your Network Can't Do Without Them

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SOA Tools: Registries

A SOA management product will typically tie into a registry such as Systinet's Registry. The registry is essentially a core place for storing information about all the services and versions that are available for people to use and information about all the consumers of those services -- contact information about those users and so forth. (For more information on registries and tying them together with SOA management tools, see "Web Services Change: How to Locate Consumers?" and "Web Services Change: Tying the Approaches Together" immediately following that section.)

SOA Tools: Summary

In summary, there are three classes of products to consider when addressing Web services versioning scenarios:

  • Web service management intermediaries
  • SOA management tools
  • Registries

As mentioned in the data-migration methods tutorial (see link above), it will be necessary to consider exactly how much downtime will be tolerable for any given service. And this tolerance will differ on a service-by-service basis. With the answers to these downtime considerations in hand, however, the organization will be best equipped to decide which SOA tools and methodologies are most appropriate for each case.

For More Information

SOA tools aren't just for Web services versioning -- not by a long shot. Learn how SOA management can govern, automate and secure your entire services network: download the free white paper, SOA Primer: Comprehensive Runtime Governance from Actional