SOA

Web Services and the PSTEP Interface Designer

Now that we have the ability to construct web services from CA Gen (on top of an EJB) one wonders if  there is  any experience of doing this in an existing CA Gen environment and any successes or failure, or points to note ?

Specifically:

• Producing custom WSDL from the PSTEP I/D
• Doing “contract-first” design
• Performance tuning
• Simple and Complex type definition
• Security

These are the things that modern SOA systems are mindful of and need to do – discussion would be great, since this is a new-ish field of play for CA Gen, and many organisations will be considering this !

CA Gen Application Modernisation – more !

Back in January, I made reference to CBDI‘s Application Modernisation posting. I noticed that they also have a collaboration with Jumar Solutions called SOA4GEN.

SOA4GEN is a methodology supported by tooling which will allow your CA Gen applications to be modernised.

Why do they need modernising if they’ve been working quite well over the last 20 years ?

There are modern paradigms of application design i.e. patterns that organisations now wish to adopt. Whilst its easy to do this in CA Gen, applications of any size will still take careful management and inspection to be able to be modernised efficiently – so use tooling and a methodology to do it in a timely fashion.

Catch up with the slide presentation here:

Outsystems’ Agility, Jumar Solutions and CA Gen – a Winning Combination

In this latest move, Jumar and Outsystems have released a set of tools which shows how the Agility platform and CA Gen are perfect bedfellows.

Doug Michael, Technical Director of Jumar Solutions tells us why here:

…and a demonstration of the platform and the way CA Gen can be leveraged is here:

Check out the page here for more information – I’m really enthused by all of this stuff – you need to look at this in more detail.

Design by Contract

Many people now are considering “Design by Contract” – where both sides (service provider and service consumer) agree on some WSDL before any coding of the services and/or consuming application takes place.

Then, both sides go away and design and build their respective components in parallel before coming together again later to test the interfaces and so on.

It strikes me that Gen doesn’t adhere to this way of thinking as yet, but how cool would it be if designers could choose to construct some WSDL “in the middle” and feed it to a developer on either side of the consumer/servicer fence (either or both could be Gen developers), and tooling could construct skeleton code into which developers plug the functionality.

Having this tooling in place would maximise the productivity of a Gen developer, since they could import a piece of WSDL ready to have the “gaps” filled in – a bit like crafting an EAB “user written code inserted here” but based around sensible standards.

What do you think ?

New CA Gen Webcast: Accessing CA Gen Servers as Web Services via the .NET Proxy

22 Oct 2008 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EST

Duration 60 min.

Learn how to deploy and invoke a .NET proxy as a web service within IIS. The process is simple and can be used to easily access CA Gen servers with a web service interface. Using a .NET proxy does not limit support to just .NET Servers, the proxy is capable of accessing most CA Gen generated server platforms. This should interest any development groups looking for a quick and simple way to turn their existing servers into web services.

Register now