Clever Coney Media has considered rolling out a service-oriented architecture (SOA) several times, but never actually did so, mostly out of the fear of introducing tight coupling between their different systems. As their understanding of messaging grew with the use of RabbitMQ, CCM realized that they could benefit from such a message-oriented middleware in their SOA strategy. Their initial assumption was that SOA meant web services that were reductive. Indeed, message queuing can also be used for interacting with services.

To kick-start their RabbitMQ-powered SOA initiative, CCM decided to start with a simple service that would expose the authentication mechanism of the main Java application. This was done to allow other applications to perform login and logout operations with end-user credentials. The first application to benefit from this will be the Ruby on Rails back office. This will allow customer service representatives to test user credentials from within...