Managing SOA Complexity with Rational Software Architect

RSA is Used to Link Existing Systems in a Major SOA Initiative

The Challenge

A medium-sized media company was embarking on a major SOA/Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) initiative to link existing systems and provide a solid foundation for new development. Each system required that a service contract be developed that outlined the services it provided and the domain objects used as arguments and results. The contract then needed to be rendered into XML schema definitions and WSDL files. The sheer volume of the required XML documents created both management and comprehension problems.

The Solution

Black Diamond Software was brought in to partner with the IBM/Rational Services Organization and create a solution using Rational Software Architect. A UML model of the domain objects and service methods for the entire SOA implementation was created using RSA.

The scope of the solution included:

• leveraging UML modeling capabilities to help architects visualize the design
• validating the model
• developing a proof-of-concept for the SOA solution
• implementing the designs alongside the client’s architecture team
• developing a custom report to render UML models into a contract document, replacing manually maintained Microsoft Word documents
• interfacing RSA with Subversion to help set up proper security

The Result

A comprehensive set of class models were created that dramatically reduced development and maintenance times while vastly improving consistency of the domain objects. A robust UML to XSD transformation provided a great deal of flexibility, addressing the fine-grained details required in the translation of the resulting documents. These documents were then able to work across several disparate platforms, including Websphere, Websphe