This post was originally published here
Apologies for not being a regular blogger these days, this is my first post from Australia. I have joined new company and moved to Brisbane – a beautiful Queensland city.
This post is mainly related to the Integration competency where I am just going to share good work being done by the architect(s) to make feel better and speed up the new comer(s) in the company like myself. I have been lacking with the terms in the previous engagement(s) like Business Service, Business Events, Integration points, Product Adapters, Channel Adapters Etc…Etc… These are key components of an Integration projects and need to be well define in the analysis phase. A proper maintenance in Wiki shall be ideal for people to understand the Integration solution.
The steps which shall be followed in the Architecture/Analysis phase are:
- Define Business Services/Business Events. For eg: If the message needs to be send from Party A to Party B to create purchase order. A Business service needs to be created like “PurchaseOrderManagement” and Business Events need to be define as CreatePurchaseOrder(), UpdatePurchaseOrder(), RetreivePurchaseOrder etc.
Creating Wiki page or register where you can add the top level “Business Services” and sub levels Business Events (or operations) shall be ideal. Give definition to your Business services and include all the business events.
Screen for the business service register should look like below:
The name of the service register should be “PurchaseOrderManagement”. The service operations are the different events which will act as a business service. Like CreatePurchaseorder, UpdatePurchaseOrder, RetreivePurchaseOrder etc.
- Each business service should have its own page to describe and define message exchange patterns 1-way, 2-way request-response etc, Integration Points, Sequence diagram, data contract, Faults (business/system), request message schema and sample, response message schema and sample, end points etc.
The page should look like this:
- Integration point diagram (component diagram) and sequence diagram should be linked or added to the service operation page.
- Integration Point Diagram: – This is a component diagram reflecting the integration points. These integration points are in the integration layer and needs to be developed in ESB (WCF/BizTalk).
The above diagram shows the front end caller, Integration Layer with the channel adapter and the ESB business service and end systems. On the same page there is a technical design section to provide the links to the business service operations this integration point is link to.
The architecture and analysis phase are more important in the life cycle of the integration project, there are many chances that things can go wrong if proper thoughts and consideration is not taken into account, otherwise we might end up doing re-factoring or re-designing the solution.
Thanks.