Author: objectiser
Date: 2008-10-02 10:56:11 -0400 (Thu, 02 Oct 2008)
New Revision: 359
Added:
cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/images/setconversationtype.png
Modified:
cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/conversation-aware-esb.xml
cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/conversation-validation-with-cdl.xml
cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/getting_started.xml
Log:
Converted some of the 'conversation aware' ESB guide into docbook format.
Added: cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/images/setconversationtype.png
===================================================================
(Binary files differ)
Property changes on:
cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/images/setconversationtype.png
___________________________________________________________________
Name: svn:mime-type
+ application/octet-stream
Modified: cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/conversation-aware-esb.xml
===================================================================
--- cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/conversation-aware-esb.xml 2008-10-02
06:02:08 UTC (rev 358)
+++ cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/conversation-aware-esb.xml 2008-10-02
14:56:11 UTC (rev 359)
@@ -4,11 +4,308 @@
<chapter id="conversationawareesb">
<title>Conversation Aware ESB</title>
<section>
- <title></title>
+ <title>Conversation based Conformance</title>
<section>
- <title></title>
+ <title>Overview</title>
<para>
+The term "conversation" represents a structured set of interactions (or message
exchanges) between one or more peer to peer services, to conduct a business transaction.
The "conversation" is defined from a service neutral (i.e. global) perspective.
</para>
+ <para>
+This document explains how such a "conversation" description can be used to
ensure conformance of one or more service implementations, within an ESB, during the
design and implementation phase of the system.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+This section introduces the choreography description language (CDL) defined by W3C, which
is a standard notation for defining conversations from a global perspective, and the
<emphasis>pi4soa</emphasis> open source project which provides an editor for
creating choreography descriptions, as well as utilizing these descriptions for
conformance checking, monitoring and execution purposes.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+Finally the section will provide a brief discussion of how CDL can be used to provide
conformance checking of an ESB, through the use of 'conversation aware' ESB
actions.
+ </para>
</section>
+ <section>
+ <title>CDL Conformance Checking</title>
+ <para>
+In general, conformance checking is the procedure for ensuring that a component has been
correctly built according to some specification or standard. In terms of CDL, it more
specifically ensures that one or more services perform their responsibilities correctly in
accordance with the choreography description.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+The <emphasis>pi4soa</emphasis> tools suite provide the mechanism for
producing service endpoint descriptions for each service within a choreography
description. The relevant service descriptions can then be compared (for conformance)
against their ESB service implementations.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+However, to make this possible, it is necessary to be able to derive the communication
'type' structure from the ESB implementation, i.e. where messages (of particular
types) are sent and received, where decision points are, where actions are performed
concurrently, etc.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+This is why a specific set of 'conversation aware' ESB actions have been defined
(discussed in a later section), to make it possible to derive the communication
'type' structure from an ESB service implementation.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+Once the communication 'type' structure has been obtained from the ESB
implementation, it can be compared against the relevant service endpoint description
projected from the choreography description, to determine if there are any differences.
These can then be reported to the ESB service developer, so that they can fix the
problems, before the service is deployed to the runtime environment.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+This ensures that all of the services will interaction correctly, as they will all have
been validated against the choreography, and therefore work together by design.
+ </para>
+ </section>
</section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>JBossESB "Conversation Aware" ESB Actions</title>
+ <section>
+ <title>Overview</title>
+ <para>
+This section outlines the various "conversation aware" ESB actions that can be
used to make the communication behaviour of a service implementation explicit, thus
enabling it to be compared for conformance against a description of the expected
behaviour.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+ <section>
+ <title>Conversational Service</title>
+ <para>
+The top level component is the <emphasis>Service</emphasis>, which will have
a single endpoint reference (i.e. service category and name) that will be used by external
clients (or other services) that interact with this service.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+However the service behaviour is stateful, and therefore will need a means of routing the
inbound request to the appropriate service descriptor that is (a) capable of handling the
request, and (b) the service instance is in an appropriate state where the service
descriptor can be executed.
+ </para>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Message Router Action</title>
+ <para>
+The action used to perform routing of the inbound requests is called
<emphasis>MessageRouterAction</emphasis>, for example:
+ </para>
+
+ <informalexample>
+ <programlisting role="XML" ><![CDATA[
+
+ <service category="ESBBroker.BrokerParticipant"
name="ESBBrokerProcess" description="">
+ <listeners>
+ <jms-listener name="BrokerServiceListener"
+ busidref="BrokerService"
+ maxThreads="1"/>
+ </listeners>
+ <actions mep="OneWay">
+ <action
class="org.jboss.soa.overlord.jbossesb.actions.MessageRouterAction"
+ process="process" name="s0-1">
+ <property name="paths">
+ <route service-category="ESBBroker.BrokerParticipant"
+ service-name="ESBBrokerProcess.main"
+ initiate="true">
+ <identity type="primary" >
+ <token name="id" locator="//@id" />
+ </identity>
+ <message type="enquiry" />
+ </route>
+ <route service-category="ESBBroker.BrokerParticipant"
+ service-name="ESBBrokerProcess.main.5" >
+ <identity type="primary" >
+ <token name="id" locator="//@id" />
+ </identity>
+ <message type="buy" />
+ <message type="cancel" />
+ </route>
+ </property>
+ </action>
+ </actions>
+ </service>
+ ]]></programlisting>
+ </informalexample>
+
+ <para>
+In this example, the 'service' endpoint reference will be associated with the
service category "ESBBroker.BrokerParticipant" and name
"ESBBrokerProcess". All inbound requests to an instance of this service will be
routed via this service descriptor.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+This service descriptor therefore only has a single action, which represents the message
routing capability. The action class is
<emphasis>org.jboss.soa.overlord.jbossesb.actions.MessageRouterAction</emphasis>.
This action only defines a single property 'path' which defines one or more
'route' elements. The attributes associated with this 'route' element
are:
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem>
+service-category and service-name, together identify the service descriptor that should
be invoked if this route is selected
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+an optional 'initiate' boolean attribute. If the attribute is specified, and its
value is 'true', then the route can only be selected if the service instance
relevant for the inbound message does not yet exist, and this message will result in a
<emphasis>CreateSessionAction</emphasis> being invoked to create the service
instance. If the attribute value is 'false', or not specified, then a service
instance must already exist that is capable of handling the inbound message.
+ </listitem>
+ </itemizedlist>
+
+ </para>
+ <para>
+The 'route' element will contain one or more 'identity' elements, and one
or more 'messageType' elements.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+The 'identity' element is used to extract information from the inbound message
that can be used to identify the appropriate service instance. The only attribute on the
'identity' element is the type of identity, which can be:
+ </para>
+
+
+ <para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem>
+primary
+<para>
+the primary identity field, used to associate a message with the session
+</para>
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+alternate
+<para>
+an alternative primary identity
+</para>
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+association
+<para>
+link the message to a session based on an identity previously associated with the session
(or parent session). However this identity will not be associated with the current
session, it is usually only used to link a child session to a parent session
+</para>
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+derived
+<para>
+the extracted identity will be placed in reserve for use as the primary identity for a
subsequent session. It is not directly associated with the session in which it is
discovered
+</para>
+ </listitem>
+ </itemizedlist>
+ </para>
+
+
+
+
+ <para>
+The one or more 'token' definitions contained within the 'identity'
element provide the details regarding the structure of the identity. The token has
'name' and 'locator' attributes, the locator being used to provide an
expression that locates the identity information within the inbound message. If more than
one token is defined, it provides a composite identity (i.e. made up of multiple parts).
+ </para>
+ <para>
+The one or more 'messageType' elements, contained within the 'route'
element, defines the message type(s) that should be routed to the service descriptor
associated with the 'route' element.
+ </para>
+<note>
+If a route is marked as <emphasis>initiate='true'</emphasis>, with
the correct message type for an inbound message, but a service instance already exists for
the identity information extracted from the message, then the route will not be selected.
The converse is also true.
+</note>
+
+<note>
+Similarly, even if a message type match is found, if the service instance is not in an
appropriate state to invoke the target service descriptor, then the route will not be
selected.
+</note>
+ <para>
+If no routes are found for a particular inbound message, then an exception will be
reported.
+ </para>
+
+ </section>
+ </section>
+ <section>
+ <title>Establishing Correspondance between ESB Configuration and
Choreography</title>
+ <para>
+All actions (and therefore service descriptors) for a particular service implementation
must be defined within the same ESB configuration file. This is a current requirement, to
ensure that all of the inter-related service descriptors are available to support the
static validation (e.g. conformance checking).
+ </para>
+ <para>
+The <filename>jboss-esb.xml</filename> file must be defined within either the
same Eclipse project as the <emphasis>pi4soa</emphasis> choreography
description (.cdm file), or in a project that has a 'project reference' to the
project containing the choreography description.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+To establish the link between the choreography description and the
<filename>jboss-esb.xml</filename>, both must 'implement' a common
<emphasis>conversation type</emphasis>.
+ </para>
+ <informalexample>
+ <programlisting role="XML" ><![CDATA[
+
+ <action
class="org.jboss.soa.overlord.jbossesb.actions.CreateSessionAction"
+ process="process" name="...">
+ ....
+ <property name="conversationType"
+ value="jboss.overlord.samples.LoanBroker@Broker" />
+ ....
+ </action>
+ ]]></programlisting>
+ </informalexample>
+ <para>
+The <emphasis>conversation type</emphasis> is specified in the
<emphasis>CreateSessionAction</emphasis> ESB action, described later in this
section, and is associated as a semantic annotation against the relevant Participant Type
or Participant Instance within the choreography description.
+ <para>
+ </para>
+To associate the <emphasis>conversation type</emphasis> with either the
Participant Type or Instance, open the choreography description in the
<emphasis>pi4soa</emphasis> choreography designer. Then select the
"Choreography->Edit Annotations" menu item from the context menu associated
with the Participant Type or Instance. In the lefthand panel, select "Add Freeform
Annotation" from the context menu, then specify "conversationType" as the
annotation type and press 'Ok'. Then select the 'Annotation' tab in the
righthand panel, and enter the conversation type, e.g.
"jboss.overlord.samples.LoanBroker@Broker". Note the '@' is important,
as the following word indicates the 'role' associated with the conversation type
which precedes the '@' symbol.
+ </para>
+
+ <imagedata fileref="images/setconversationtype.png" width="4in"
/>
+
+
+ </section>
+ <section>
+ <title>Managing Sessions</title>
+ <para>
+A "session" represents a specific instantiation of a service definition that is
involved in a business transaction (or conversation). The "session" will be
distinguished based on unique identity information relevant to the business transaction,
that is derived from specific properties within the messages being exchanged by the
interacting services.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+The service description can be composed from other reusable sub-service descriptions,
although the service can only define a single 'root' (i.e. top level) definition.
+ </para>
+ <section>
+ <title>Business State and Logic</title>
+
+ <para>
+Each top level or sub-service description will be associated with a business state
'pojo' class that contains its business relevant information and logic (i.e.
methods). This class is identified by the property 'session', which will be
associated with the initial conversation based ESB actions in a service (or sub-service)
description, or in any subsequent conversation based ESB actions that require the
information to determine the session instance.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+As well as representing the business state and logic for a session (or sub-session), the
pojo can define an annotation that provides information about the session. The annotation
type is
<classname>org.jboss.soa.overlord.jbossesb.actions.Service</classname>.
+ </para>
+
+ <informalexample>
+ <programlisting>
+
+ package org.jboss.soa.overlord.samples.jbossesb.loan.broker;
+
+ import org.jboss.soa.overlord.jbossesb.actions.Service;
+
+ @Service(name="{http://www.jboss.org/overlord/loanBroker}Broker",
+ conversationType="jboss.overlord.samples.LoanBroker@Broker",
+ root=true)
+ public class BrokerMain {
+ ....
+ }
+ </programlisting>
+ </informalexample>
+
+ <para>
+The 'name' attribute represents a name associated with the complete service
description, encompassing both top level and composed sub-session behaviour. The
'root' attribute indicates whether this pojo is related to the top level session,
or a sub-session.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+For pojos that represent the 'root', or top level session, for a service
description, they should also specify the optional 'conversationType' attribute.
This expresses the type that will be checked for conformance, and is comprised of two
parts separated by the '@' symbol. The first part is a fully qualified name of the
conversation type. The second part represents the role being played within the
conversation type.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+If the <emphasis>Service</emphasis> annotation is not defined on the pojo,
then the information (service description name, root and optional conversation type) must
be explicitly defined in the relevant conversation based ESB actions.
+ </para>
+
+ </section>
+ <section>
+ <title>Instantiating top level and child sessions</title>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Retrieving an existing session</title>
+ </section>
+
+ </section>
+ <section>
+ <title>Interacting</title>
+ <para>
+ </para>
+ </section>
+ <section>
+ <title>Managing Information</title>
+ <para>
+ </para>
+ </section>
+ <section>
+ <title>Controlling Flow</title>
+ <para>
+ </para>
+ </section>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Generating a JBossESB Configuration from CDL</title>
+ <section>
+ <title>Overview</title>
+ <para>
+ </para>
+ </section>
+ <section>
+ <title>Generating the JBossESB Configuration</title>
+ <para>
+ </para>
+ </section>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Dealing with Conformance Issues</title>
+ <section>
+ <title>Overview</title>
+ <para>
+<todo>Explain how conformance issues are reported and about the quickfix mechanism
- including the standard ways to resolve problems</todo>
+ </para>
+ </section>
+ </section>
+
</chapter>
+
Modified:
cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/conversation-validation-with-cdl.xml
===================================================================
---
cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/conversation-validation-with-cdl.xml 2008-10-02
06:02:08 UTC (rev 358)
+++
cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/conversation-validation-with-cdl.xml 2008-10-02
14:56:11 UTC (rev 359)
@@ -19,62 +19,7 @@
</para>
</section>
- <section>
- <title>WS-CDL</title>
-
- <para>
-WS-CDL, or Web Service Choreography Description Language, is a candidate recommendation
from W3C. Although associated with W3C and Web Services, it is important to begin by
stating that the Choreography Description Language (CDL) is <emphasis
role="bold">not</emphasis> web service specific.
- </para>
- <para>
-The purpose of CDL is to enable the interactions between a collection of peer to peer
services to be described from a neutral (or global) perspective. This is different to
other standards, such as WS-BPEL, that describe interactions from a service specific
viewpoint.
- </para>
- <para>
-In essence a choreography description declares roles which will pass messages between
each other, called interactions. The interactions are ordered based on a number of
structuring mechanism which enables loops, conditional, choices and parallelism to be
described. In CDL variables used for messages and for conditionals are all situated at
roles. There is no shared state rather there is a precise description of the state at each
role and a precise description of how these roles interact in order to reach some notion
of common state in which information is exchanged and processed between them.
- </para>
- <para>
-In CDL we use interactions and these structuring mechanisms to describe the observable
behaviour, the messages exchanges and the rules for those exchanges and any supporting
observable state on which they depend, of a system.
- </para>
- </section>
-
- <section>
- <title>pi4soa</title>
- <para>
-<emphasis>pi4soa</emphasis> is an open source project established to
demonstrate the potential benefits that a global model (as described using CDL) can
provide when building an SOA. The open source project is managed by the Pi4 Technologies
Foundation, which is a collaboration between industry and academia.
- </para>
- <para>
-Building complex distributed systems, without introducing unintended consequences, is a
real challenge. Although the Choreography Description Language provides a means of
describing complex systems at a higher level, and therefore help to reduce such
complexity, it does not necessarily guarantee that erronous situations cannot occur due to
inappropriately specified interactions. The research, being carried out by members of the
Pi4 Technologies Foundation, into the global model and endpoint projection is targeted at
identifying potential unintended consequences, to ensure that a global description of a
system can be reliably executed and can be free from unintended consequences.
- </para>
- <para>
-The tool suite currently offers the ability to:
- </para>
- <para>
- <itemizedlist>
- <listitem>
- Define a choreography description
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Export the description to a range of other formats, such as BPMN, UML
activity/state/sequence models, and HTML
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Define scenarios (equivalent to sequence diagrams), with example messages, which can
then be simulated against an associated choreography
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Generate template endpoint implementations:
- <para>
- <itemizedlist>
- <listitem>
- WS-BPEL for deployment in ActiveBPEL
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Java stubs for execution with the pi4soa state machine, with deployment options for
Apache Axis, J2EE (JBoss, Glassfish) and JBoss ESB
- </listitem>
- </itemizedlist>
- </para>
- </listitem>
- </itemizedlist>
- </para>
</section>
- </section>
<section>
<title>Configuration of Conversation Validation</title>
Modified: cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/getting_started.xml
===================================================================
--- cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/getting_started.xml 2008-10-02
06:02:08 UTC (rev 358)
+++ cdl/trunk/docs/docbook/userguide/src/main/module/getting_started.xml 2008-10-02
14:56:11 UTC (rev 359)
@@ -1,260 +1,316 @@
-<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
-<!DOCTYPE chapter PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd" [
-]>
-<chapter id="gettingstarted">
- <title>Getting Started</title>
- <section>
- <title>SOA Governance with CDL </title>
- <section>
- <title>Overview</title>
- <para>
- The CDL component of the Overlord SOA governance project aims to leverage the
concept of a choreography (or conversation)
- description to provide design-time and run-time governance of an SOA.
- </para>
- <para>
- A Choreography provides the means to describe the service interactions between
multiple parties from a global (or service neutral) perspective.
- This means that it is possible for an organisation to define how an end-to-end
business process should function, regardless of whether orchestrated
- or peer-to-peer service collaboration will be used.
- </para>
- <para>
- Although in simple situations, a BPEL process description can provide a
description of the interactions between multiple services, this only works where a
- single orchestrating process is in control. The benefit of the choreography
description is that it can be used to provide a global view of a process across multiple
- orchestrated service domains.
- </para>
- <para>
- This document will outline how the Choreography Description is being used as part
of Project Overlord to provide SOA governance capabilities
- for each phase of the SOA lifecycle.
- </para>
- <para>
- When a validated design has been approved by the users, it can be used to generate
an initial skeleton of the implementation for each service.
- The current version of Overlord enables a skeleton implementation to be generated
as a JBossESB service configuration file,
- using 'conversation aware' ESB actions. For more information on these,
please see the “Conversational ESB User Guide”.
- </para>
- </section>
-
- <section>
- <title> SOA Lifecycle Governance </title>
-
- <section>
- <title>Design Time Governance</title>
- <para>
- Design-time governance is concerned with ensuring that the resulting system
correctly implements requirements (whether functional or non-functional).
- A choreography description can be used to ensure that the implemented system
meets the behavioural requirements.
- </para>
- <para>
- The behavioural requirements can be captured as a collection of scenarios (e.g.
sequence diagrams) with associated example messages.
- This enables an unambiguous representation of the business requirements to be
stored in a machine processable form, which can subsequently
- be used to validate other phases of the SOA lifecycle.
- </para>
- <para>
- Once the choreography description for the SOA has been defined, it can be
validated against the scenarios,
- to ensure that the choreography correctly handles all of the business
requirements.
- </para>
- <para>
- Once the service enters the implementation phase, it is important to ensure that
it continues to adhere to the design
- and therefore meets the business requirements. Currently this is achieved through
the use of techniques such as continuous testing.
- However this is only as reliable as the quality of the unit tests that have been
written.
- </para>
- <para>
- When a 'structured' implementation language has been used, such as
WS-BPEL, jPDL or the new 'conversation aware' ESB actions,
- it will be possible to infer the behaviour of the service being implemented, to
compare it against the choreography description.
- Currently this has been implemented for the “conversation aware” ESB actions,
and is demonstrated using the samples in this Overlord-CDL distribution.
- </para>
- <para>
- Detecting incorrectly implemented behaviour at the earliest possible time saves
on downstream costs associated with finding and fixing errors.
- By using static validation against the original design, it ensures that the
implemented service will deliver its expected behaviour first time.
- This is important in building large scale SOAs where different services may be
implemented in different locations.
- </para>
- <para>
- There are two other areas where a choreography description can be used as part of
design-time governance,
- that are not currently implemented in Overlord:
- </para>
- <itemizedlist>
- <listitem>
- Service lookup – the choreography description can be used to determine if a
service already exists in the Service Repository that meets the appropriate behavioural
requirements.
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Service unit testing - this can be achieved using the scenarios originally
specified to document the behavioural requirements.
- Rather than develop an independent source of test data, the scenarios can be
used to validate the sequence of messages sent to,
- and received from, a service, as well as validating the contents of the
messages returned from the service under test.
- </listitem>
- </itemizedlist>
- </section>
-
- <section>
- <title>Runtime Governance</title>
- <para>
- Runtime governance ensures that the SOA executes as expected according to
predefined policies. In this context, a choreography description can be used in two ways.
- </para>
-
- <section>
- <title> Service validator</title>
- <para>
- The choreography description represents the interactions between multiple
services to deliver a business goal.
- To validate the behaviour of each individual service, within the
choreography description, the behaviour of each service can be derived from the
choreography.
- </para>
- <para>
- The derived behaviour (or “endpoint projection”) of a service can be used
within a 'service validator' to monitor the inbound and outbound messages for the
service,
- to ensure they conform to the expected behaviour.
- If an invalid message is detected, it would be possible to block it, to
prevent it from causing subsequent problems in downstream systems.
- The error can also be reported to a central management capability.
- </para>
- <para>
- The CDL component of Overlord provides the ability to configure service
validators to monitor the behaviour of individual services.
- An enhanced version of the JBossESB trailblazer example has been included,
with the appropriate validator configuration, to demonstrate this mechanism.
- </para>
- </section>
-
- <section>
- <title>Process correlation</title>
- <para>
- Validating each service locally can enable errors to be detected quickly,
- and the effects of the error prevented from contaminating other systems by
blocking the erroneous messages.
- </para>
- <para>
- However local service specific validation may not be adequate to identify
errors that would affect the end-to-end business process.
- Therefore the message activity at each service validator can be reported
to a central 'process correlation engine' which can reconstitute a global view of
the business transaction,
- and determine if it matches the expected behaviour as defined in the
choreography description.
- </para>
- <para>
- The benefit of a correlated global view of the distributed business
transaction is that it can be further analysed to ensure other governance polices have
been followed – e.g. SLAs.
- </para>
- <para>
- The pi4soa tool suite includes a simple GUI based monitoring tool to
display the information obtained from correlating message events associated with
individual services.
- The trailblazer example has been written to cause out of sequence
messages under certain circumstances. See the “Samples Guide” for more information on how
to run this example.
- </para>
- </section>
- </section>
- </section>
-
- <section>
- <title> First Steps </title>
- <para>The first step will be to follow the instructions in the next chapter
to install Overlord. </para>
- <para> Once installed, the next step should be to try out the examples in
the samples folder. The examples consistent of:</para>
- <itemizedlist>
- <listitem>
- Service Validation related examples
- <para>
- The samples folder contains an enhanced version of the trailblazer example
from the JBossESB, with the addition of a File Based Bank, and message content including a
conversation id to enable the messages to be correlated with a specific session.
- </para>
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Conversation aware ESB actions, with conformance checking against
Choreography
- <para>
- Two examples have been included, one simple example (purchasing)
and the other more advanced (brokerage). Both relate to the business process of purchasing
items. The second example introduces the concept of a broker to act on behalf of the
customer, interacting with multiple potential suppliers.
- </para>
- <para>
- These examples show how a service implementation (built using
“conversation aware ESB actions” in this case), can be continuously checked for
conformance against a choreography description.
- </para>
- <para>
- The final step should be to review the other documents in the
docs folder to understand more about each capability, and then try using the techniques on
your own project.
- </para>
- </listitem>
- </itemizedlist>
- </section>
- </section>
-
- <section>
- <title>Installation</title>
-
- <section>
- <title> Overview </title>
- <para>
- This section describes the installation procedure for the Overlord CDL based
governance capabilities. These capabilities are:
- </para>
- <itemizedlist>
- <listitem> Conversation aware ESB Actions with conformance checking
against a Choreography Description </listitem>
- <listitem> ESB Service validation against a Choreography Description
</listitem>
- </itemizedlist>
- </section>
-
- <section>
- <title>Prerequisites</title>
- <orderedlist>
- <listitem>JBossAS (version 4.2.3.GA or higher), available from
http://www.jboss.org/jbossas</listitem>
- <listitem>JBossESB (version 4.4.GA or higher), available from
http://www.jboss.org/jbossesb</listitem>
- <listitem>Overlord CDL (version 1.0-SNAPSHOT or higher)
</listitem>
- <listitem>
- pi4soa (version 2.0.0 or higher), available from
http://www.pi4soa.org
- <note>
- <para>
- It is recommended that a pre-packaged version is used, which includes all of
the necessary Eclipse related plugins.
- However the plugins can be installed separately into an existing Eclipse
environment by following the instructions on the
www.pi4soa.org wiki.
- </para>
- </note>
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Ant, available from
http://ant.apache.org/
- </listitem>
- </orderedlist>
- </section>
-
- <section>
- <title>Installation Instructions</title>
- <orderedlist>
- <listitem>
- Install JBossAS
- <para> Unpack the JBossAS installation into the required location.
</para>
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Install JBossESB
- <para> Unpack the JBossESB installation into a location alongside the
JBossAS installation.
- Then follow the instructions in the JBossESB installation
(install/readme.txt), to deploy JBossESB into the JBossAS environment.
- </para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- Install the Overlord CDL distribution
- <para>
- Unpack the Overlord CDL distribution into a location alongside the JBossAS
installation.
- </para>
- <para>
- <itemizedlist>
- <listitem>
- Edit the <emphasis
role="bold">install/deployment.properties</emphasis> file to update the
JBossAS and JBossESB location settings.
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- From the install folder, run: <command> ant deploy</command>to
deploy both the Overlord CDL conversational ESB actions and service validation
capabilities.
- Or <command>ant deploy-overlord-cdl-runtime</command> to deploy just
the conversational ESB actions support, or <command>ant
deploy-overlord-cdl-validator</command> to deploy just the service validation
capability.
- </listitem>
- </itemizedlist>
- </para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- Install pi4soa
- <para>
- Unpack the pi4soa pre-packaged Eclipse version into a location alongside the
JBossAS installation, or install the relevant plugins (as described on the pi4soa wiki)
into an existing Eclipse environment.
- </para>
- <para>
- If just the service validation capabilities are being used, then no further
configuration of the Eclipse environment is necessary.
- However if the conversational ESB actions, with conformance checking against a
Choreography Description, will be used, then the following additional steps will be
required:
- </para>
- <para>
- <itemizedlist>
- <listitem>
- Start the Eclipse environment
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Select the “Help - > Software Updates...” menu item
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- From the <emphasis role="bold"> Available
Software</emphasis> tab, press the “Add Site...” button
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Press the “Local” button, browse to locate the <emphasis
role="bold">tools</emphasis> folder in the Overlord CDL distribution,
- and then press the OK button. This will cause the local Eclipse update site,
bundled with the Overlord CDL distribution, to be add to the <emphasis
role="bold"> Available Software </emphasis> tab.
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- Select the root node of the newly added local update site, and then press the
“Install” button and follow the instructions to install the plugins.
- </listitem>
- </itemizedlist>
- </para>
- </listitem>
-
- </orderedlist>
- </section>
-
-</section>
-
-</chapter>
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
+<!DOCTYPE chapter PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd" [
+]>
+<chapter id="gettingstarted">
+ <title>Getting Started</title>
+ <section>
+ <title>SOA Governance with CDL </title>
+ <section>
+ <title>Overview</title>
+ <para>
+ The CDL component of the Overlord SOA governance project aims to leverage the
concept of a choreography (or conversation)
+ description to provide design-time and run-time governance of an SOA.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ A Choreography provides the means to describe the service interactions between
multiple parties from a global (or service neutral) perspective.
+ This means that it is possible for an organisation to define how an end-to-end
business process should function, regardless of whether orchestrated
+ or peer-to-peer service collaboration will be used.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Although in simple situations, a BPEL process description can provide a
description of the interactions between multiple services, this only works where a
+ single orchestrating process is in control. The benefit of the choreography
description is that it can be used to provide a global view of a process across multiple
+ orchestrated service domains.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ This document will outline how the Choreography Description is being used as part
of Project Overlord to provide SOA governance capabilities
+ for each phase of the SOA lifecycle.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ When a validated design has been approved by the users, it can be used to generate
an initial skeleton of the implementation for each service.
+ The current version of Overlord enables a skeleton implementation to be generated
as a JBossESB service configuration file,
+ using 'conversation aware' ESB actions. For more information on these,
please see the “Conversational ESB User Guide”.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>WS-CDL</title>
+
+ <para>
+WS-CDL, or Web Service Choreography Description Language, is a candidate recommendation
from W3C. Although associated with W3C and Web Services, it is important to begin by
stating that the Choreography Description Language (CDL) is <emphasis
role="bold">not</emphasis> web service specific.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+The purpose of CDL is to enable the interactions between a collection of peer to peer
services to be described from a neutral (or global) perspective. This is different to
other standards, such as WS-BPEL, that describe interactions from a service specific
viewpoint.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+In essence a choreography description declares roles which will pass messages between
each other, called interactions. The interactions are ordered based on a number of
structuring mechanism which enables loops, conditional, choices and parallelism to be
described. In CDL variables used for messages and for conditionals are all situated at
roles. There is no shared state rather there is a precise description of the state at each
role and a precise description of how these roles interact in order to reach some notion
of common state in which information is exchanged and processed between them.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+In CDL we use interactions and these structuring mechanisms to describe the observable
behaviour, the messages exchanges and the rules for those exchanges and any supporting
observable state on which they depend, of a system.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>pi4soa</title>
+ <para>
+<emphasis>pi4soa</emphasis> is an open source project established to
demonstrate the potential benefits that a global model (as described using CDL) can
provide when building an SOA. The open source project is managed by the Pi4 Technologies
Foundation, which is a collaboration between industry and academia.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+Building complex distributed systems, without introducing unintended consequences, is a
real challenge. Although the Choreography Description Language provides a means of
describing complex systems at a higher level, and therefore help to reduce such
complexity, it does not necessarily guarantee that erronous situations cannot occur due to
inappropriately specified interactions. The research, being carried out by members of the
Pi4 Technologies Foundation, into the global model and endpoint projection is targeted at
identifying potential unintended consequences, to ensure that a global description of a
system can be reliably executed and can be free from unintended consequences.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+The tool suite currently offers the ability to:
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem>
+ Define a choreography description
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Export the description to a range of other formats, such as BPMN, UML
activity/state/sequence models, and HTML
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Define scenarios (equivalent to sequence diagrams), with example messages, which can
then be simulated against an associated choreography
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Generate template endpoint implementations:
+ <para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem>
+ WS-BPEL for deployment in ActiveBPEL
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Java stubs for execution with the pi4soa state machine, with deployment options for
Apache Axis, J2EE (JBoss, Glassfish) and JBoss ESB
+ </listitem>
+ </itemizedlist>
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+ </itemizedlist>
+ </para>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title> SOA Lifecycle Governance </title>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Design Time Governance</title>
+ <para>
+ Design-time governance is concerned with ensuring that the resulting system
correctly implements requirements (whether functional or non-functional).
+ A choreography description can be used to ensure that the implemented system
meets the behavioural requirements.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The behavioural requirements can be captured as a collection of scenarios (e.g.
sequence diagrams) with associated example messages.
+ This enables an unambiguous representation of the business requirements to be
stored in a machine processable form, which can subsequently
+ be used to validate other phases of the SOA lifecycle.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Once the choreography description for the SOA has been defined, it can be
validated against the scenarios,
+ to ensure that the choreography correctly handles all of the business
requirements.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Once the service enters the implementation phase, it is important to ensure that
it continues to adhere to the design
+ and therefore meets the business requirements. Currently this is achieved through
the use of techniques such as continuous testing.
+ However this is only as reliable as the quality of the unit tests that have been
written.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ When a 'structured' implementation language has been used, such as
WS-BPEL, jPDL or the new 'conversation aware' ESB actions,
+ it will be possible to infer the behaviour of the service being implemented, to
compare it against the choreography description.
+ Currently this has been implemented for the “conversation aware” ESB actions,
and is demonstrated using the samples in this Overlord-CDL distribution.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Detecting incorrectly implemented behaviour at the earliest possible time saves
on downstream costs associated with finding and fixing errors.
+ By using static validation against the original design, it ensures that the
implemented service will deliver its expected behaviour first time.
+ This is important in building large scale SOAs where different services may be
implemented in different locations.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ There are two other areas where a choreography description can be used as part of
design-time governance,
+ that are not currently implemented in Overlord:
+ </para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem>
+ Service lookup – the choreography description can be used to determine if a
service already exists in the Service Repository that meets the appropriate behavioural
requirements.
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Service unit testing - this can be achieved using the scenarios originally
specified to document the behavioural requirements.
+ Rather than develop an independent source of test data, the scenarios can be
used to validate the sequence of messages sent to,
+ and received from, a service, as well as validating the contents of the
messages returned from the service under test.
+ </listitem>
+ </itemizedlist>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Runtime Governance</title>
+ <para>
+ Runtime governance ensures that the SOA executes as expected according to
predefined policies. In this context, a choreography description can be used in two ways.
+ </para>
+
+ <section>
+ <title> Service validator</title>
+ <para>
+ The choreography description represents the interactions between multiple
services to deliver a business goal.
+ To validate the behaviour of each individual service, within the
choreography description, the behaviour of each service can be derived from the
choreography.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The derived behaviour (or “endpoint projection”) of a service can be used
within a 'service validator' to monitor the inbound and outbound messages for the
service,
+ to ensure they conform to the expected behaviour.
+ If an invalid message is detected, it would be possible to block it, to
prevent it from causing subsequent problems in downstream systems.
+ The error can also be reported to a central management capability.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The CDL component of Overlord provides the ability to configure service
validators to monitor the behaviour of individual services.
+ An enhanced version of the JBossESB trailblazer example has been included,
with the appropriate validator configuration, to demonstrate this mechanism.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Process correlation</title>
+ <para>
+ Validating each service locally can enable errors to be detected quickly,
+ and the effects of the error prevented from contaminating other systems by
blocking the erroneous messages.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ However local service specific validation may not be adequate to identify
errors that would affect the end-to-end business process.
+ Therefore the message activity at each service validator can be reported
to a central 'process correlation engine' which can reconstitute a global view of
the business transaction,
+ and determine if it matches the expected behaviour as defined in the
choreography description.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The benefit of a correlated global view of the distributed business
transaction is that it can be further analysed to ensure other governance polices have
been followed – e.g. SLAs.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The pi4soa tool suite includes a simple GUI based monitoring tool to
display the information obtained from correlating message events associated with
individual services.
+ The trailblazer example has been written to cause out of sequence
messages under certain circumstances. See the “Samples Guide” for more information on how
to run this example.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+ </section>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title> First Steps </title>
+ <para>The first step will be to follow the instructions in the next chapter
to install Overlord. </para>
+ <para> Once installed, the next step should be to try out the examples in
the samples folder. The examples consistent of:</para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem>
+ Service Validation related examples
+ <para>
+ The samples folder contains an enhanced version of the trailblazer example
from the JBossESB, with the addition of a File Based Bank, and message content including a
conversation id to enable the messages to be correlated with a specific session.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Conversation aware ESB actions, with conformance checking against
Choreography
+ <para>
+ Two examples have been included, one simple example (purchasing)
and the other more advanced (brokerage). Both relate to the business process of purchasing
items. The second example introduces the concept of a broker to act on behalf of the
customer, interacting with multiple potential suppliers.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ These examples show how a service implementation (built using
“conversation aware ESB actions” in this case), can be continuously checked for
conformance against a choreography description.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The final step should be to review the other documents in the
docs folder to understand more about each capability, and then try using the techniques on
your own project.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+ </itemizedlist>
+ </section>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Installation</title>
+
+ <section>
+ <title> Overview </title>
+ <para>
+ This section describes the installation procedure for the Overlord CDL based
governance capabilities. These capabilities are:
+ </para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem> Conversation aware ESB Actions with conformance checking
against a Choreography Description </listitem>
+ <listitem> ESB Service validation against a Choreography Description
</listitem>
+ </itemizedlist>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Prerequisites</title>
+ <orderedlist>
+ <listitem>JBossAS (version 4.2.3.GA or higher), available from
http://www.jboss.org/jbossas</listitem>
+ <listitem>JBossESB (version 4.4.GA or higher), available from
http://www.jboss.org/jbossesb</listitem>
+ <listitem>Overlord CDL (version 1.0-SNAPSHOT or higher)
</listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ pi4soa (version 2.0.0 or higher), available from
http://www.pi4soa.org
+ <note>
+ <para>
+ It is recommended that a pre-packaged version is used, which includes all of
the necessary Eclipse related plugins.
+ However the plugins can be installed separately into an existing Eclipse
environment by following the instructions on the
www.pi4soa.org wiki.
+ </para>
+ </note>
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Ant, available from
http://ant.apache.org/
+ </listitem>
+ </orderedlist>
+ </section>
+
+ <section>
+ <title>Installation Instructions</title>
+ <orderedlist>
+ <listitem>
+ Install JBossAS
+ <para> Unpack the JBossAS installation into the required location.
</para>
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Install JBossESB
+ <para> Unpack the JBossESB installation into a location alongside the
JBossAS installation.
+ Then follow the instructions in the JBossESB installation
(install/readme.txt), to deploy JBossESB into the JBossAS environment.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+
+ <listitem>
+ Install the Overlord CDL distribution
+ <para>
+ Unpack the Overlord CDL distribution into a location alongside the JBossAS
installation.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem>
+ Edit the <emphasis
role="bold">install/deployment.properties</emphasis> file to update the
JBossAS and JBossESB location settings.
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ From the install folder, run: <command> ant deploy</command>to
deploy both the Overlord CDL conversational ESB actions and service validation
capabilities.
+ Or <command>ant deploy-overlord-cdl-runtime</command> to deploy just
the conversational ESB actions support, or <command>ant
deploy-overlord-cdl-validator</command> to deploy just the service validation
capability.
+ </listitem>
+ </itemizedlist>
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+
+ <listitem>
+ Install pi4soa
+ <para>
+ Unpack the pi4soa pre-packaged Eclipse version into a location alongside the
JBossAS installation, or install the relevant plugins (as described on the pi4soa wiki)
into an existing Eclipse environment.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ If just the service validation capabilities are being used, then no further
configuration of the Eclipse environment is necessary.
+ However if the conversational ESB actions, with conformance checking against a
Choreography Description, will be used, then the following additional steps will be
required:
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem>
+ Start the Eclipse environment
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Select the “Help - > Software Updates...” menu item
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ From the <emphasis role="bold"> Available
Software</emphasis> tab, press the “Add Site...” button
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Press the “Local” button, browse to locate the <emphasis
role="bold">tools</emphasis> folder in the Overlord CDL distribution,
+ and then press the OK button. This will cause the local Eclipse update site,
bundled with the Overlord CDL distribution, to be add to the <emphasis
role="bold"> Available Software </emphasis> tab.
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ Select the root node of the newly added local update site, and then press the
“Install” button and follow the instructions to install the plugins.
+ </listitem>
+ </itemizedlist>
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+
+ </orderedlist>
+ </section>
+
+</section>
+
+</chapter>