SOA Services
In This Section:
Mediation Development
As your organization develops and defines more services, the threshold is usually 40-50 services, the disparate requirements for the data structures and protocols of the services make it difficult to have the services all communicating directly with each other. The effort required to wrap every service with matching protocols and some form of generic superset data structure becomes unmanageable.
To decouple the data structure and protocol for the service interfaces, it is normal practice to develop an Enterprise Service Bus consisting of a set of Mediation Services that perform translation between different data structures (data transformation) and protocols (protocol conversion), keeping specific interface dependency on other services out of your core business services.
Mediation Development deliverables:
- Well-written and documented mediation services.
- Deployment and testing of the developed mediation services in the specified Enterprise Service Bus.
In order to begin an Mediation Development engagement, you must meet the following prerequisites:
- Operational Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) including, but not necessarily limited to WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere ESB.
- Documentation of data structures and protocols of endpoint services to be mediated exists and is available. Such documentation may be WSDL files or any agreed metadata format including, but not limited to COBOL copybooks, XML Schema/DTD, C Header files, industry standards (SWIFT, EDI, …) for data structures and JMS or MQ Queue/Topic definitions or HTTP URLs for protocols. If you do not have such definitions, consider an MQSoftware Service Enablement engagement.
Duration: Highly variable from 1 week to 2 years. Generally 2-5 distinct mediation services can be developed per week with additional time for testing.