Matjaz Juric

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), one of the key technologies for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), has become the accepted mechanism for defining and executing business processes in a common vendor-neutral way. Companies ranging from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and BEA to smaller organizations such as Fuego and Lombardi have committed to BPEL as a building block for SOA. BPEL, which has been designed specifically for defining business processes, supports typical interactions such as synchronous and asynchronous operation invocation, sequential and parallel flows, message correlations, fault and compensation handlers and activities triggered by events. Business processes often require human interactions as well. Since the BPEL specification doesn't address them, you might think BPEL isn't suitable for business processes that involve people. But that's n... (more)

J2EE, EAI, and Web Services

Today Web services are believed to be the crucial technology for e-business. Technically, they don't differ considerably from distributed components, such as EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans), CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), or even COM+ (Component Object Model). Web services have: An XML-based transport protocol: SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) An XML-based language that defines the interfaces of Web services: WSDL (Web Services Definition Language) A directory service: UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) The mission of Web services however, ... (more)

J2EE as the Platform for EAI - Supporting open-standard technologies - part 1 of 2

An enterprise platform has to provide ways to integrate with existing systems and applications. The fact is, most companies have applications and they don’t exist in isolation. New applications developed on the J2EE platform need to be integrated with other applications. Although this might sound relatively simple, we must be aware that companies need fully integrated information systems. This means that all applications, no matter which technology they’re developed in, function as a large integrated system. The total integration of applications within a company is referred to as... (more)

J2EE for EAI

Last month's article "J2EE As the Platform for EAI" (JDJ, Vol. 7 issue 3) discussed the suitability of the J2EE platform for EAI (Enterprise Application Integration). This article addresses more advanced integration topics, particularly transaction and security, support for Web services, and an overview of J2EE application servers. EAI enables concurrent access to data and functionality shared between disparate existing applications while maintaining integrity, consistency, performance, and recoverability. Transactions play an important role in ensuring integrity, consistency, a... (more)