Financial Services Architect Forum - Part 2

About: This is the second in a series of posts about the spring session of the financial services architect forum, this post focuses on the ‘SOA Governance, managing J2EE and .NET services’ and ‘J2EE and .NET interoperability’ sessions, presented by the  Lead
Architect of Amerpoint and the Chief Technology Officer of JNBridge respectively

Hello,

As mentioned in my earlier post, I will be detailing interesting highlights from various sessions in a series of posts this week; today I wanted to focus on presentations by Mark and Wayne which resonated well with the attendees.

SOA Governance, managing J2EE and .NET services

Mark started the session by discussing the benefits of SOA and why governance is critical for realizing these promised benefits. He mentioned that governing an SOA environment is challenging because these environments are distributed, cross-platform, federated and dynamic and include components beyond your control. An effective SOA governance strategy must:

1. Ensure operational health
2. Provide insight into business transactions
3. Manage across multiple machines
4. Address heightened security concerns
5. Enable online upgrades and versioning
6. Detect and handle exceptional conditions and
7. Set and maintain appropriate service levels

Irrespective of the platform, IDE and physical location of application components. It must also address the concerns of the various development, infrastructure, architecture and business stakeholders.

Mark presented the following SOA maturity model and discussed the benefits, scope, champions, goals and practices at each level of the pyramid.

The session also included a discussion about SOA governance as a combination of design time  and runtime governance mechanisms. The design time activities include the definition of policy and processes whereas the runtime component must be capable of enforcing these polices. Mark presented the solution by Amberpoint that addresses the issue of SOA governance in a technology-agnostic manner and outlined some of the key features e.g. .dependency tracking and policy versioning. performance testing, service level managing, tracking and report and others that facilitate in implementing a SOA governance solution.

Lastly, Mark presented some interesting case studies about organizations at various SOA maturity levels that have used Amberpoint’s software to implement SOA governance. One of case studies about an institution providing financial services required a strategy that allows for governance of J2EE and .NET components in a high volume mission critical system. The solution deployed by Amberpoint had a 94% user approval, helped the company radically reduce the cost of SOA governance and increased the number of leads processed by the staffs by over 50% 

Justifying the value of SOA

 

I gave a short talk about justifying the value of SOA and the new methodology by Microsoft which is technology-agnostic in nature and uses a business-capability and SOA based approach to bridge the gap between the business and IT architectures. I will write more about the MOTION methodology in the coming weeks at this blog as well.

 

J2EE and .NET interoperability

 

Wayne started by describing why an organization may need to interoperate between J2EE and .NET and listed Web Services, Binary Conversions, Source Conversions and Bridging as possible options for interoperability. He mentioned that Web Services are a great interop solution but an alternate approach might be needed if your solution requires:

 

1. High performance
2. Access to a fine-grained object-oriented API
3. Frequent, “chatty” cross-platform communications
4. Callbacks
5. Cross-platform exception handling
6. Cross-platform references

 

Wayne outlined the features of JNBridge which is a solution based on .NET remoting, and described how it allows you to share memory between Java and .NET processes as well as allowing HTTP/SOAP and fast binary protocols across the systems, he presented some data around the order of magnitude difference between using HTTP/SOAP vs. TCP/IP.

 

Lastly Wayne described some of the scenarios in which people are using JNBridge, some of these scenarios include

 

1. Several call centers (including banking, healthcare) connecting .NET desktop clients to J2EE back ends
2. ASP.NET-based Web app displaying advertising rates off a Java-based DoubleClick feed, for a major Web portal
3. .NET report generation component connected to Sybase EA Server through JMS, for private financial trading network
4. ISV added a .NET API to its a Java-based credit derivative analytics package
5. Insurance quote system with .NET GUI front end and J2EE back end
6. Document management system integrating Interwoven Worksite (.NET/COM) with J2EE legacy back end, for large law firm
7. Self-serve help desk system for university, integrating ASP.NET front end, Microsoft ISA (for single sign-on), and HP OpenView Service Desk (Java-based)

The last post in this series will focus on the panel discussions on Identity Management and Federation and Data Center Virtualization, stay tuned!

 

 

Best regards,

Mohammad