Developing a REST based Web Service

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architecture for distributed hypermedia systems. The World Wide Web is possibly the best known implementation of this architecture style. The term "REST" was coined and described by a dissertation written by Roy Fielding in 2000. This article by Nicholas Floyd covers the architecture which contains four basic constructs that address common concerns such as: scalability, generalized interfaces and resources, and patternized approaches for manipulation of resources.

Using Business Rules to Define Decision Points in Oracle SOA Suite: Part 1

In this two part article by Matt Wright, we will look at how we can use the Business Rules engine to externalize rules from a BPEL process into a separate decision service. Once we've done this, we will know how to invoke the rule from a BPEL process. At run time there may be many potential paths through a BPEL process, controlled by conditional statements such as switch or while activities. Typically the business rules that govern which path to take at any given point are written as XPath expressions embedded within the appropriate activity.

Although this is an acceptable approach, we often find that while the process itself may be relatively static, the business rules embedded within the activities may change on a more frequent basis. This will require us to update the BPEL process and redeploy it even though the process flow itself hasn't changed. In addition, by embedding the rule directly within the decision point, we often end up having to re-implement the same rule every time it is used, either within the same process or across multiple processes. Apart from being inefficient, this can lead to inconsistent implementations of the rules as well as requiring us to update the rule in multiple places every time it changes.

Implementing a Basic HelloWorld WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) Service

SOA is an architectural design pattern by which several guiding principles determine the nature of the design. Basically, SOA states that every component of a system should be a service, and the system should be composed of several loosely-coupled services.WCF is the acronym for Windows Communication Foundation. It is Microsoft's latest technology that enables applications in a distributed environment to communicate with each other.WCF is an umbrella technology that covers ASMX web services, .NET remoting, WSE, Enterprise Service, and System Messaging. It is designed to offer a manageable approach to distributed computing, broad interoperability, and direct support for service orientation. WCF supports many styles of distributed application development by providing a layered architecture. At its base, the WCF channel architecture provides asynchronous, untyped message-passing primitives. Built on top of this base are protocol facilities for secure, reliable, transacted data exchange and a broad choice of transport and encoding options. In this article by Mike Liu, we will implement a basic WCF service from scratch.

New SOA Capabilities in BizTalk Server 2009: WCF SQL Server Adapter

In this article by Richard Seroter, you will learn what's WCF SQL Adapter, how to go about executing composite transactions, polling for data, and using SQL Server Query notifications.