Mashing Up The Bus: Getting Ready for the Convergence of SOA & Web 2.0

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Dain Hansen's Blog | August 1, 2007   6:19 PM | Comments (1)

Regarding Anant’s recent article on Mashups on “Are You Ready For Mashups”, he talks about something that we continue to hear: Web 2.0 technologies are converging to SOA and Enterprise IT technologies. This is real — and we better get ready!

So I thought I would write a short blog on an exercise I recently did while getting ready. The problem I wanted to solve: render individual AquaLogic Administrative dashboards into a consolidated view [Hey isn’t that a Mashup?]. For a simple example, I put a single Dashboard snippet view from AquaLogic Service Bus into AquaLogic User Interaction. You can almost think of this as a “Hello Enterprise Mashup World” example for combining elements of AquaLogic into Web 2.0 technologies. Granted, there are much more challenging things I could have incorporated, like using REST services together with Pages, Ensemble & Pathways, but I thought for all those Service Bus fans out there in the world, I would show something cool.

What this sample looks like… And this is just the beginning!

Requirements. Install these products First.

• AquaLogic Service Bus 2.6
• AquaLogic User Interaction
• Kapow WebClipper BEA Edition 6.2
• A Web Server – Any will do, you can even use Tomcat

Simple Instructions:

1. Start up the ALSB samples domain.
2. Build the Kapow webclip using Kapow by clicking the appropriate tags that you want to render in your ALUI application. For mine I did a simple login script and then click the Pipeline alerts tab. You can use the sample I provided if you would like to skip this step of creating a Kapow web-clip. You can also do something similar which is to use AquaLogic Pathways to extract data that you need. It so happened that this example the webclipping was all I needed, but I could have used Pathways to retrieve the % of errors or warning results into a web service.
3. Deploy the WebClip onto an app server. You can follow the example listed in Kapow documentation for using the rstl-demo as a sample on Tomcat.
4. Create an iframe to reference the Kapow webclip. You’ll need to do this to render it correctly in ALUI. You can use my example attached.
5. Using ALUI you will need to create a remote web service that points to the iframe on the Tomcat server.
6. Using ALUI now create a web portlet that points to the remote web service, almost there…
7. Load the portlet into a ALUI home page.

Now let us run it!

• You’ll need to restart the tomcat server after you deployed. WebLogic doesn’t have this problem by the way…
• Deploy the Robo Server for Kapow, this serves the webclip to the app server so that you can display the webclip appropriately.
• Make sure you send some messages through the ALSB sample app so you can see some pipeline alerts show up on the dashboard. The sample domain in ALSB doesn’t set Pipeline alerts by default, so you can add some of those to make your dashboard as pretty as mine.

So what is the point of all this?

Well, I’ve got a live, constantly refreshing piece of the AquaLogic Service Bus Dashboard sitting in a view in ALUI that can be delegated for a community of Operations and Architect. And by the way, did I mention that it refreshing in real-time, even while sitting in ALUI?

The point is this: it shows you just the beginning of what is possible when you start to take our Enterprise suite of products in AquaLogic, like Bus, BPM, Data Services Platform, Enterprise Security and shows you how you can extend the power of these products when you enable them for Web 2.0 in a collaborative environment. It just so happens that this aleady exists today with BEA.

Your Homework Assignment

• You can embellish this example using some of BEA’s new Web 2.0 products together with ALUI under Pages, Ensemble & Pathways – some cool resources there you can leverage.
• You can also extend this example to other consoles that exist in BEA.
• Share with us how you think this can be extended.

Good luck. And you better get ready. I know I am!  

File Attachment: ALSB.clip (4 KB)

File Attachment: iframe_alsb (81 bytes)

Comments

• very cool. maybe it will make it onto the stage at BEAWorld :)

  Posted by: qwall on August 31, 2007 at 4:29 PM