Bradley D. Brown

In today’s blog entry I’m going to talk about our Agile SOA technology!

iPerspective

As I mentioned, iPerspective is our technology that enables our Agile SOA methodology.  iPerspective makes all of your data and business logic look like Web Services and Periscope makes all of your data look like it’s in an Oracle database.  In other words, both are virtualization technologies.  They make non-common platforms operate in a homogenous environment.

Periscope

Periscope is our technology that turns any service into a query.  In other words, you can query from a Web Service as if the data is coming from your database.

Imagine for a minute if you had the ability to write a query from a Web service.  I’m calling this “Service as a Query” or “Query from a Service” or “Query Service” for short…

For example, let’s say you wanted to write a query against a Web service from http://www.thomas-bayer.com/ that contains an operation called getBank.  The service contains a bank ID (biz).

select bankName, bankId, location, plz

from   thomas_bayer_bank_service

where biz = 20041133

Powerful, right?  Absolutely!  Or let’s say you want to query from http://www.abundanttech.com/ ”dead or alive” service and call the getTodaysBirthdays operation (that has no parameters):

select *

from   todays_birthdays

Or let’s say you used Yahoo Pipes to pull Oracle’s current stock price and then you want to query from a RESTful service to get this information - now:

select current_stock_price, link, details

from   yahoo_pipe_oracle

Or what if you want to query from Google:

select *

from   google

where  searchString = ‘Bradley D. Brown’

Web Services allow you to run a program on another server as if it’s on the same server.  You don’t need to know the operating system, the hardware platform, the programming language or much of anything about the source system.   You simply run the program on another server.  That’s what a Web Service is.  Just think about the power of being able to query from ANY data source as if that data is in your own database.  That’s what I’m calling a Query Service!

Rolta’s iPerspective product allows you quickly expose your existing business logic and data as Web Services.  As discussed below, iPerspective adds key features to your service deployment.  Rolta’s Periscope product gives you Query Service functionality right out of the box.  You can query from ANY Web Service with a simple SQL Query!  Imagine the power of this type of functionality.  Any product that uses a JDBC driver can now query from any Web Service as if the data is on the same system.  That’s powerful!

Differentiators

Here are some of the key iPerspective differentiators:

·                     Federated (i.e. cross DB) queries

–     Security

o   i.e. if you want put a digest, LDAP, single sign-on layer on top of services – with a button click

·                     All different bindings of the WSDL (i.e. old formats to new)

·                     Release management - Grouping of objects into different releases of services

·                     A repository of your services -

o   i.e. a pretty complete stack all in one

·                     Extended object support – we support a lot of things that JDev didn’t in the past – i.e. overloaded functions in a package, record types, and MANY, MANY more – basically any Oracle ERP package/API can be turned into a service

·                     Dynamic service - We have a service type that allows you to call it and pass in your SQL statement and we have security options that allow you to restrict what objects can be used and you can lock down the gateway or allow the service to accept this and you can pass in a federated query too

·                     Virtual private service - ability to provide access to a service that gives a customer only their data

·                     ApEx, Sensedia and UDDI support - We deploy our service repository to a number of other repositories

·                     RESTful services - with a click, you can make your release a RESTful release

·                     Auto deployment - we can deploy to 1 server or 100 at once

·                     Open Adaptor API – we have an open API for Security, Gateways. Code generation

Open Architecture Model for iPerspective

iPerspective is the middle man between your data or business logic and your consumers.  Data meaning databases, files, etc.  Business logic meaning code that you’ve already written.  By consumers I mean the things that will use your existing data and business logic.  Things like mashups or dashboards, workflow or BPEL processes, or applications that will integrate to other applications.

iPerspective is built on open technology and it’s an open architecture as well.  What does this mean for you?  If it’s built on open technology, why not just go out and download all of the open source technologies on your own?  Well, they have shortcomings and they are difficult to pull together.  We’ve done the hard work for you.  You might ask – what do you mean by an “open architecture?”  iPerspective provides open APIs to allow you to add new functionality to it.  If you want to interface to some data source that we don’t support today, it’s easy to do so.

iPerspective sits between the source data and business logic and the consumers…so it includes security.  iPerspective is flexible – it has an open architecture.  You can add your own data sources, gateways, code generators, security, etc.

Bradley D. Brown agile, soa agile soa