General Services Administration: Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI)

Brief Description

FAS faced challenges regarding agility, integration, security, standards-based technology implementation, and pressure to reduce expenditures. To address these challenges, FAS Office of Chief Information Officer (OCIO) decided to leverage a SOI approach which can be used to integrate legacy business systems, decouple functional from non-functional concerns. The FAS SOI project was an important step towards this direction.

In particular, SOI focused on the following technologies:

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
Java Business Integration (JBI)
Business Process Management System (BPMS)
In addition, the SOI project focused on open source SOA products, including:

Apache ServiceMix
OpenESB
JBossESB
Intalio BPMS
We examined three open source ESB platforms and provided assessments from both architectural and functional perspectives. In particular, we focused on the role of JBI, the standard basis for Java-based ESB, in such areas as reusability, interoperability, and maintainability. We also documented recommendations and issues for achieving interoperability among ESB platform with standard based technologies such as web services and Java Messaging Service (JMS).

Reusing existing assets, including logic implemented in J2EE technologies is one of the main objectives for refactoring a J2EE application for the ESB platform. Within the scope of SOI, we refactored an FAS production application for each of the ESB platforms and recommended best practices for porting J2EE applications to ESB with little or no changes, while taking advantage of the various services provided by the ESB. While the refactored application retained the same functional interface, it leveraged ESB’s support for security, reliable messaging, web service transaction, and other quality of service capabilities. At the same time, the refactored applicaiton allows for better maintainability and interoperability.

We elaborated the relationship between SOI and BPM. As SOI provides the platform for loosely coupled composite applications, continuous business improvements through business process management now becomes possible. However, integrating BPMs and ESB is not an easy task, in part because there are numerous technology choices and the products often offer overlapping capabilities. To address these issues, we recommended an “Architecture Driven Approach” to build the IT infrastructure. Instead of starting from a vendor product, requirements for an SOA stack should be based on the capabilities needed to address business requirements. We demonstrated this approach by implementing BPM orchestration for the newly refactored services.

Last but not least, we recommend a “Model Driven Approach” to develop business services and processes, as MDA is the best approach to preserve IT investment in the face of rapid technology changes. In such an approach, the business services and focus on business concerns, not dependent on technology platforms.

Project Results and Benefits

By establishing an open source, open standard based platform for service-oriented integration, the SOI project helped FAS take a significant step in developing an enterprise SOA platform that promotes reusability, interoperability, and maintainability, including

Establishing principles and patterns for reuse, interoperability, and agility
Aligning with FAS SOA Reference Architecture
Providing open source ESB platform comparison and assessment
Elaborating the relationship of ESB and BPMS
An FAS SOA lab was setup with multiple ESB and BPMS products, including

OpenESB
Apache ServiceMix
JBossESB
Intalio BPMS