Blog
Articles, tutorials, and field notes on identity, integration, API management, and application security — spanning nearly two decades of hands-on work.
Service Mediation vs. Service Orchestration
I’ve wanted to define this term for a while, but, someone beat me to it several years ago. I generally agree with what these guys have to say. These terms are still in use today at client sites where DataPower and the IBM SOA stack is being deployed. Service Mediation logic is the application of…
Data Transformations
In a previous post, I described the different types of Data Formats that are commonly used with ESBs, XML Gateways, and SOA. Converting from one format to another is a common task performed by an ESB or XML Gateway. One can make arguments either way about whether this functionality should exist in…
Data Formats
To follow up on the Wire Protocol post, the next logical step in our SOA exploration is Data Formats. A web service message’s Data Format describes how the data is organized in the message.
Wire Protocols
Like so much of our computer industry, the ecosystem around SOA has many acronyms, buzzwords, and phrases that are supposed to mean something. Likewise, this jargon may be poorly defined or ambiguous. The posts that I have made over the past few months are slowly building up a common vocabulary…
Recommended Reading Material for SOA
Following up on the recommended reading lists I’ve posted recently, this post contains a list of the books and specifications that I direct people to about SOA.
SOA Security Reading Material
At nearly every client site, I’m asked to put together a recommended reading list on a variety of subjects. Web Services security is generally among them. SO, I’m putting together a list of the links that usually make it on that list.
SOA Actors
When I am describing complex SOA or Web Service architectures, environments, and scenarios to clients, I often use the term “SOA Actors” to generically refer to components of such environments in the abstract. I will often do the same on Thinkmiddleware.com posts. Here, I define what I mean by this…
What is a Service Consumer?
A Service Consumer is any tier of an organization’s systems that calls web services. These services could be implemented by SOAP, REST, XML over HTTP, EJBs, JMS or MQ applications, RMI, RPC, invocation of COBOL programs on a mainframe with 3270 screen-scraping, communication over a custom TCP…
What is a Service Provider?
A Service Provider is any tier or system in an organization’s environment that hosts web services (or services of any kind).
What is an ESB?
In the past year, I have stood in a conference room at more than one client fielding a question along the lines of exactly what is an ESB? I’ve found that there is a wide variety of impressions about what exactly makes something an ESB. I’m hardly the first person to post something on the Internet…
What Is A SOAP Web Service?
A SOAP Web Service is any web service that is compliant with the SOAP 1.1 or SOAP 1.2 specs. When referring to a SOAP Web Service we will use the capitalized Web Service. This convention is followed by most publications within the industry.
What is a Web Service? What is a web service?
This one has probably been addressed many times. But, I needed a place to link to whenever it comes up in other posts. For our purposes, a Web Service is SOAP Web Service and a web service is anything acting as a web service in the generic sense.