Enterprise Metadata Discovery

12/15/2004

Service-Oriented Architectures are the wave of the future, but easy interoperability with existing IT assets is a must. This proposed specification addresses a key roadblock in ensuring connectivity to existing systems via adapters. Adapter partners and other ISVs are invited to work with us in delivering a strong specification and implementations to the marketplace. Other SOA Platform vendors are invited to join this cross-industry initiative by adopting these specifications, thus allowing seamless interoperability.

Metadata Discovery and Invocation Specification for J2CA J2EE is a rich environment for building and managing enterprise class applications and solutions. With the rise of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), more and more enterprises are deploying SOA solutions in a J2EE environment, but need to service-enable their existing IT assets in order to realize the full benefits of business automation via SOA. IBM and BEA are collaborating on specifications that will enable more productive development of and deployment of this "last mile" of integration. The "Metadata Discovery and Invocation Specification for J2CA" is a cross-industry initiative spearheaded by IBM and BEA, and supported by our mutual adapter vendor and application vendor partners. This new specification provides a standard way of managing this "last mile" with a seamless design-time experience, thus allowing customers significant productivity improvements in service-enabling their existing IT assets.

Independent studies have shown that the majority of the costs of an integration solution or an SOA implementation are due to the "last mile" of integration (that is, the connection from the integration application to the legacy systems). Costs of purchasing, supporting and servicing adapters (or building one's own if off-the-shelf ones are lacking) directly impact the TCO and time-to-value of an integration solution.

The reasons for this are numerous, but all point to a fundamental structural problem in the industry. Infrastructure vendors cannot build rich, high-quality adapters for more than a subset of all the end systems out there, without sufficient scale to offset the costs. An industry based on partnering could solve this, but standards immaturity has stood in the way.

Customers demand rich tooling for service-enabling and connecting back-end application functionality into an SOA. However there is no Java standard that enables this kind of tooling interoperability, so vendors can only address this by building proprietary extensions for developer productivity. This results in interoperability challenges between platform and adapter vendors' solutions, typically addressed with expensive one-off development or on-site consulting. Either way, the costs ultimately get passed to customers.

The Enterprise Metadata Discovery specification intends to solve the problem of standard rich tooling interfaces for adapters, thus unlocking the potential of the integration industry to deliver higher quality adapters to more end systems at lower costs. Adapter vendors can focus on building more and better adapters, without worrying about interoperability of proprietary extensions. Infrastructure vendors can focus on building better platforms and better development experiences. And application vendors and other ISVs can build their own "last mile" components, confident that a fully standard implementation will address both runtime and design-time interoperability requirements. As a result, any adapter product can plug seamlessly into any infrastructure vendor's J2EE SOA implementation, delivering both superior end-to-end runtime behavior and developer productivity.

The result to end customers will be greater adapter availability and quality at lower cost. Existing IT assets can be service-enabled more readily, thus reducing the TCO and improving time-to-value of an SOA implementation. Moreover, each component in the end-to-end solution will have been built to agreed-upon specifications as opposed to proprietary extensions, thus reducing vendor lock-in.

Get additional information on Enterprise Metadata Discovery in the following white paper:

  Enterprise Metadata Discovery (PDF)

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