Cape Clear tilts ESB for on-demand apps
Published:27-September-2007
By BR staff writer
Sensing a groundswell of demand for software on demand, Cape Clear's latest version of its enterprise service bus offering has added several features that would facilitate SaaS (software as a service).
It starts with building in new support for multi-tenancy, where you accommodate multiple, concurrent sessions for different clients or customers by keeping them well-partitioned. And it also involves new capabilities for bundling all the supporting attributes of a service, so each instance for each customer does not have to be assembled from scratch.
The multi-tenancy support comes by way of giving you the ability to, in effect, "segment" a service. It starts with the ESB recognizing which users are requesting the service and then managing execution within a logical partition or sandbox; if it's a new user, the ESB would create a new logical partition.
The result is that multiple users can reuse the same service, and because each deployment is logically separated, can tailor that service and target it to the appropriately walled off portion of the back end database.
Another feature of the new release simplifies piecing together all the attributes associated with deploying a web service so the requestor can consume it. As these items are technically not part of the service definition, they traditionally had to be specified separately.
For instance, when a user requests a service, it comes with assumptions on what kind of transport the user expects, such as whether to use HTTP or FTP. Other factors related to consumption of the service include any types of transformations that the user requires, such as that the data populate an Excel; spreadsheet; or how the user or class of user is authenticated.
In the new edition of its ESB, Cape Clear lets you bundle all of the these specifications into an assembly that is based on the Spring framework. Previously, you would have had to use a graphical editor to specify each attribute related to service consumption in graphical editors separately.
Admittedly, this assembly capability doesn't support multi-tenancy directly. But, according to CEO Annrai O'Toole, it does come in handy for multi-tenant situations because by nature, you will have many different kinds of service consumers, each of whom will have different conditions specified in their respective service contracts regarding how they access a service. By enabling you to create these specifications as bundles, it simply speed up the process of provisioning new users to access services in multi-tenanted environments.
Not directly related to multi-tenancy, the new version speeds up BPEL processing by providing the ability to edit, debug, or modify BPEL orchestrations that are already in process. You can replay a message to test reliability, dynamically add variables to BPEL processes, and archive large stores of BPEL processes.
In essence, the new features treat BPERL more as a programming language, which, according to O'Toole, is what it has become. "We see BPEL as more of a programming than an orchestration language," he said, noting that it provides a way to abstract the service logic from all the low-level messaging constructs. In other words, BPEL provides a higher level alternative to raw coding aspects like state management, timers, and event handlers into your process, or chain of services.
Cape Clear's Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Platform version 7.5 is available now.
Our View
There are a couple things interesting about this release. The first is that, although SOA and web services have been hailed as a potentially simplified way of connecting to back end systems, the reality is that they have their own set of complexities. So it's interesting to see Cape Clear pick up on the Spring framework, whose initial mission in life was to demystify and provide a kinder, simpler alternative to J32EE.
The other point of note was O'Toole's observation that BPEL is evolving more into a programming than orchestration language, at least in the eyes of those that are using it (as opposed to vendors who legislated the standard within Oasis). His observation indirectly lends credence to those in the BPM community who maintain that processes are best orchestrated in BPM tools, which use higher level process flow constructs than the programmatic orientation of BPEL.
