Friday, December 17, 2010

Core service logic and auxiliary service logic

Here's a nice scenario I have encountered recently:

Customer management wants every activity performed by a customer and every customer contact logged in the customer data store.

For this purpose, every relevant service and process in the service inventory is fitted with auxiliary logic to create customer logs in the CRM system.

Historically, this has worked for several years, but recently the system administrators started complaining about the sheer amount of data in the system and how it is becoming very hard to keep the system displaying these logs to the CM agent without running expensive (long-running) queries.

To cut a long story short, they want to reduce the amount of data logged for a customer by creating a new policy which only logs significant activities on a customer record.

For this to work, the initial request was to remove the logging logic from certain service capabilities.

In the service inventory, a whole bunch of services has, besides the relevant core service logic, some hard coded auxiliary CRM logging logic which will use a utility service to push the logged data to the CRM system.

As it is impacting many different services which are used in different contexts, removing the auxiliary logic as requested may not be the best way to go about this. Not only does this cost a lot of effort and regression testing, but also does it not solve the issue that the same service should log to the CRM system in one context, but not in another.

An alternative, perhaps more flexible way of changing the system's logging logic, is to change the utility service or apply a policy to this service which acts as a filter, deciding for all services whether or not to execute the actual CRM system update.

This means that the logging logic can still stay in the services as auxiliary logic, and the decision whether or not to perform the actual update will happen in the CRM system can be managed (declaratively), external to the core service logic of the services needing the logging, and external to the actual logging service itself.

This can work only if the context of the service call is also recorded with the logging message.

An alternative to this approach can be that all services log messages to the CRM system per default, but publish the message into a queue or topic and selectively process messages based on business rules in a business rules engine or similar.

Monday, December 13, 2010

SOA Pattern Publishing - why?!

Hi all,

Recently I have been posting a lot of candidate patterns on soapatterns.org, the pattern-related site of soasystems.com.

I was a matter of time before someone might ask "what are you doing and why are you doing it?". Well, it happened. Anyway, the reason why I wrote this post is because people ask why use soa patterns, why document soa patterns and there's only one simple reason for me doing this.

SOA patterns are proven solutions for common problems. Some of the candidate patterns I have documented may seem like open doors or a shot at an empty goal - but that's a good thing actually. What it means is that people recognize a certain solution for a problem, to actually be a good or at least a viable solution. And if people recognize the structure of the solution, does that not mean that they have just recognized a pattern in what they are seeing?

SOA patterns are not rocket science. SOA patterns are not smart or unique solutions. They are merely a common way of fixing a problem that we've encountered more than just once.

Does that mean it should not be documented? I don't think so. By documenting it, I hope to save other people's time and effort; because if someone recognized a documented soa pattern as something that can be applied to their problem, with or without modifications, that particular goal is reached.

Why am I publishing candidate patterns and not patterns? Well, it's in the definition of the soa pattern. For it to be a pattern it must be proven - as in - used in the field by more than one person. A site like soapatterns.org manages exactly that. This is also why I'm asking with every candidate pattern published by myself, to get others to testify that they have used the same pattern or a similar approach for real too. Because only if a group of people would testify they use it, it can be considered a pattern instead of a candidate pattern.

Keep watching this blog for a couple of more patterns to come. Presently finalizing patterns on rules normalization and rule layers and a couple of more service inventory related patterns. And if you've done something similar to what's described in one of my pattern candidates - or any others in the list - be sure to let the people at soapatterns.org know that you did. This way you, the community, can contribute to the field.

Regards,

-Roger

Monday, December 6, 2010

Published Reference Data Distribution candidate pattern

Hi all,

I just published the Reference Data Distribution candidate pattern. I'm looking for people to testify that they have applied this pattern to get it promoted from the candidate to the pattern status. Check it out here at soapatterns.org.

- Roger