Event-Driven SOA

SOA and EDA Are a Natural Fit

By now, we all know that SOA is about a better alignment of business and IT through business processes and services. A goal of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is to create a more agile and dynamic IT that can respond quickly to new business opportunities, requirements, and threats by quickly developing and deploying new capabilities from putting together composite applications from reusable business services. In addition to providing easier development, customization and maintenance of large-scale, distributed applications and services, an event-driven architecture (EDA) allows enterprise applications and systems to be constructed in a manner that facilitates more responsiveness. Progress Software believes that SOA and EDA are peers and uniquely complement one another. We are dedicated to delivering SOA, or service enablement, technologies that can transform a company's existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, complex and often inflexible IT systems into a set of more connected, simplified and adaptable ones that can better support the business.

An event-driven SOA – an interaction between events and services that will perform simple or complex functions, or even orchestrate entire business processes - is ideal for distributed enterprise systems because it will deliver the benefits of SOA and EDA, including modularity, loose-couplings, and adaptability. The composition of the event-driven SOA infrastructure is the generation of the event in the ESB (enterprise service bus) layer and propagation of the event, the complex event processing, the triggering of a business process and the processing of the event for monitoring purposes. Progress delivers infrastructure software and technology solutions, such as Progress® Apama® and Progress® Sonic ESB®, that enable a company to build and support an agile and dynamic event-driven SOA.

ESBs Exploit the Power and Flexibility of an Event-Driven SOA

Companies face large numbers of complex events daily, and responses are expected in real time, so building a communication model to exploit the power and flexibility of an event-driven SOA is a high priority for software development and IT professionals. An event-driven communication model is able to respond better to real-time changes and stimuli than conventional request/reply mechanisms. An ESB is generally the way service requests move on an SOA as messages. An ESB guarantees that the message, whatever it may be (the request to see customer data, the actual data, etc…), gets delivered from consumer to service or vice versa. Progress® Sonic ESB®, the world's first and market-share leading ESB, is a messaging-based ESB that will simplify the integration and flexible reuse of diverse and often proprietary business systems by manipulating them as modular, standards-based services which can be rapidly combined to serve the business in new ways. Sonic ESB drives all services in a system over a decoupled, message-communication backbone. Services registered with the bus have no knowledge of other registered services; therefore, each service is concerned with processing only the events it receives. Sonic ESB seamlessly integrates SOA with business process management (BPM) in an Eclipse-based design environment, Progress® Sonic Workbench™, to makes business processes agile and keeps them flexible for reuse in the future. It offers QoS management through unique policy-based service orchestration that meet the demands of your high-volume SOA projects. In short, if you haven't already deployed an ESB, you should because it simplifies the realization of flexible and reliable architectures (SOA and EDA) for mission critical applications. With an ESB as the messaging framework, and message broker, within your event-driven SOA, you will be able to increase the reuse of existing assets in the organization (which increases ROI) and to assemble heterogeneous applications to form smart business solutions. With proper planning, an ESB can be a common foundational element for SOA and event processing.

Event Processing and Your SOA

Chances are that your company has already started on the path towards SOA. But are you implementing the right SOA for the long term? You may not be if your SOA implementation doesn't support event processing. Complex event processing (CEP) enables companies to process distributed business events and identify opportunities or threats, and making sense of these business events requires event processing technology and domain expertise. Progress® Apama® Event Processing Platform monitors rapidly moving event streams, detects and analyzes important patterns, and acts - in milliseconds. While traditional architectures can respond to events after they have happened, Apama's event-driven architecture ensures real-time responsiveness to fast moving events of any kind, leveraging a platform that combines flexibility, performance and interoperability. Including Apama as part of your event-driven SOA plan will give your enterprise the ability to rapidly respond to negative situations or take advantage of emerging opportunities.

When combined, SOA and event processing can create extreme value to business operations. SOA and event processing will help expose business information that is otherwise locked in application silos and databases. So while services and SOA are used to help unlock information and business processes so they are available to other applications, business events are the nervous system of the enterprise and, when leveraged by an event-driven SOA, can disseminate business events to all authorized parties in the extended enterprise.

Event-Driven SOA

SOA and EDA Are a Natural Fit

ESBs Exploit the Power and Flexibility of an Event-Driven SOA

Event Processing and Your SOA

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