Book Image

SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009

By : Richard Seroter
Book Image

SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009

By: Richard Seroter

Overview of this book

SOA is about architecture, not products and SOA enables you to create better business processes faster than ever. While BizTalk Server 2009 is a powerful tool, by itself it cannot deliver long-lasting, agile solutions unless we actively apply tried and tested service-oriented principles. The current BizTalk Server books are all for the 2006 version and none of them specifically looks at how to map service-oriented principles and patterns to the BizTalk product. That's where this book fits in. In this book, we specifically investigate how to design and build service-oriented solutions using BizTalk Server 2009 as the host platform. This book extends your existing BizTalk knowledge to apply service-oriented thinking to classic BizTalk scenarios. We look at how to build the most reusable, flexible, and loosely-coupled solutions possible in the BizTalk environment. Along the way, we dive deeply into BizTalk Server's integration with Windows Communication Foundation, and see how to take advantage of the latest updates to the Microsoft platform. Chock full of dozens of demonstrations, this book walks through design considerations, development options, and strategies for maintaining production solutions.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface
Index

Types of services


There are multiple ways to look at types of services, and I've chosen to consider the types of services based on the category of message they accept.

RPC services

A Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a means of executing a function on a distant object. These remote invocations are meant to appear as if they were happening locally and typically following the request/response communication pattern. If you've written DCOM or CORBA components before, then this is a familiar concept. As SOAP gained traction, this was initially seen as just another way to execute remote functions but in a more interoperable way. However, this encourages a very point-to-point mentality.

RPC-style services follow the "Gang of Four" Command pattern where objects (in our case, messages) correspond to the action you wish to perform. In essence, you are sending a message that tells the remote service what to do. For example, the payload of an RPC-style service request meant to create a new customer entity...