Working for almost one and half year in SOA projects for several customers, I can now conclude that almost every component is made fully reusable by means of a service. One service for database communication, one service for communication with the CRM module etc. One implementation that can be reused in every corner of the SOA environment.
However, each time I evaluate a SOA project I have done or working on I conclude that there is one component we can’t write once and use everywhere: the front-end application. Suppose you have a fully reusable customer service to retrieve customer information from the database. Each time you want to integrate a front-end functionality to query the customer information in a specific front-end application in you SOA article you have to write the view layer again for most parts. You are not able to completely reuse the view implementation to query the database. Therefore, in my opinion the front-end components for user interaction in a SOA envirnoment are not really in the SOA scope.
With the Web service for Remote Portlets (WSRP 2.0 OASIS specification) standard, a specification which defines how to leverage SOAP-based Web services that generate mark-up fragments within a portal application, you are able to fully reuse front-end applications in SOA environment. WSRP is based on WS standards like the WSDL, therefore it can also be registred with an UDDI. Note that WSRP can be used on top of the JSR-168 specification for building standard portlets.
Recently, Oracle released the Webcenter Suite that contains a fully compliant WSRP portlet container. I think this will augment the Oracle SOA Suite with capabilities to make reusable front-end components.
February 28th, 2007 at 19:16:38
[...] Original post by Tom Hofte and plugin by Elliott Back [...]
March 1st, 2007 at 11:57:00
Just a small correction.
>>Recently, Oracle released the Webcenter Suite that
>>contains a fully compliant WSRP portlet container.
Oracle’s WebCenter Suite comes with an application server that can serve as a *JSR-168* portlet container. The WebCenter Suite Framework then leverages the WSRP standards to register portlet producers and consume their content via a specific ADF Faces component (adfp).
Check out: http://www.cumquat.nl/webcenter_1.html
(Sorry – Only in Dutch)
March 1st, 2007 at 12:15:30
Thanks for your correction!
By the way, a nice article about Webcenter on your company’s site. Do you already have some real-world user-experience? My experience is still left to some simple test cases.
March 1st, 2007 at 16:26:26
No real-world user-experience if you mean paying customers that already want to embark on the WebCenter train. We have been asked by Oracle to present at their Fusion Middleware Seminar and to that end we’ve been experimenting with the framework (on and off) for a month or two now. An important reason for us is/was to find out how well WebCenter can consume our Tangelo JSR-168 based portlets.
March 1st, 2007 at 18:04:03
[...] Original post by Tom Hofte [...]