Cleaning up with SOAP, XML
Cleaning up with SOAP, XML
The promise of Web services to remove the complexity of enterprise application integration (EAI) is bearing some fruit, with vendors embracing Internet standards in their EAI tools.
BEA Systems has fully integrated the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) into its WebLogic server architecture. The nomenclature is slightly different: instead of Web services it’s “business information services”, and the XML templates are collectively branded as Liquid Data. However, according to Lim Chin Keng, product marketing manager for South East Asia at BEA Systems, the new integration technologies allow users of WebLogic servers to “take advantage” of Web services.
”Organisations have invested over the last 20 years in buying packaged applications, but now data is locked within these products. What customers have found is that it is nearly impossible to extract information out in a fast and easy manner. That’s where our tool comes in. EAI is put in place in their infrastructure to have access to data locked in these proprietary systems,” he said.
To extract data from these legacy systems, XML translators can be set up by programmers so that the content of the databases can be, as the jargon goes, “published” as XML “views”, and then “consumed” by newer applications such as business intelligence, customer relationship management or enterprise portal systems. The translators and XML queries used in this process can be reused for multiple applications, according to Mr Lim.
”Previously you coded a custom join [to do that], and it was not flexible or reusable. Liquid Data allows you to create customised views so you can execute a view and extract out the necessary data, and do that join on real-time data,” he said.
Similarly, Candle has said it will integrate support for the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) into its Omegamon systems management platform this year. SOAP is a Microsoft-devised technology based on XML, intended to replace CORBA and DCOM in application-to-application communication. Ed Hallock, product consulting manager at Candle, said that instead of systems management tools from vendors such as Tivoli, Computer Associates or Hewlett-Packard exchanging alerts when things went wrong, SOAP would allow bidirectional data exchanges.
”System management applications have been fairly closed in providing system management information, other than through the standard proprietary user interfaces. We thought it was time to open up the kimono and start exchanging information. We can do better integration in technologies our customers have already invested in,” he said.
Mr Hallock said Candle would be the first of the mainframe-centric enterprise-wide systems management developers to embrace Internet standards. Embracing SOAP would give these applications access to lower-end Windows-based applications like Exchange through Microsoft’s BizTalk specification, according to Mr Hallock.
”We are just now crossing the bridge to look at applications on the Windows platform,” he said. “We have got the technologies in place, like the universal agent technology. It has a variety of data providers that lets it pull information from different types of platforms.”