First of all, SOA is an organization concept aiming for an IT infrastructure that is aspired to the individually required business operations and which is able to react to any changes in the business environment. This results in a system architecture, which mainly provides technical services and functionalities. In the SOA context, such functionality is defined as service, which can be accessed over a uniform/standardized interface.
The functionality combination for an entire business operation can be a composition of separate, loosely linked services. The uniform interface makes it irrelevant, whether the services are provided by different programs on different servers. This provides an extensive integration of quite heterogeneous IT ecosystems on a shared base, while ensuring high reusability and independence from concrete service implementations.
Quite often, web services are mentioned in connection with SOA. This only means, that it is possible to access a service via web standards such as HTTP, FTP and SMTP as a transport medium, just like in SOA. A web service can be identified explicitly via a URI and its interface is defined per XML.
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ClassiX® provides the option to communicate with other applications as part of a service-oriented architecture. For this, ClassiX® provides a CORBA interface, a standardized interface, which makes communication with ClassiX® possible. This communication is based on the InstantView® message concept. That way, it is possible to send InstantView® messages to ClassiX® instances and to pass any parameters. ClassiX® provides different services which can be easily implemented in InstantView®. To address different ClassiX® systems and therefore services, standardized CORBA mechanisms are implemented, such as the CORBA naming service. Running ClassiX® instances log in here and can then be queried by other applications. This kind of name resolution enables message sending to the ClassiX® systems. The ClassiX® instances log into the CORBA naming service with unique names and can therefore be selectively addressed. |
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In ClassiX®, services are therefore mapped on an InstantView® message. Parameters are just as usually passed to the stack. That way, any services that can be accessed via CORBA, can be implemented in InstantView®. Communication among ClassiX® instances is certainly possible, too. It is possible to return service results to the external application, if the external application implements the CORBA interface to receive messages, too. The InstantView®-based service can return the results, by simply sending an according message to the external application and passing the data to the stack. With each ClassiX® setup, the program cxsendmsg.exe is provided as an exemplary implementation of a simple application, which communicates with ClassiX® via CORBA interface. This command line program can send a message with the according parameters to any ClassiX® instance. For the near future, ClassiX® plans to support SOAP-based web services. This is also possible via CORBA interface by generating an adapter, which converts requests that have been received via SOAP into CORBA-based communication with ClassiX®. |
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