ITBusiness Edge: Old Reliable - FTP Still Relevant in an SOA, Cloud World

Loraine Lawson covers "Old Reliable" FTP and its relevance to SOA and Cloud Computing.  FTP is "reliable" as in "a reliable friend that you can always call," however, the protocol itself is not reliable for content delivery unless Managed File Transfer (MFT) type products are used to enable reliability using FTP.  The article is well written and covers an important trend that brings SOA, Cloud Computing, and Managed File Transfer under a single, manageable umbrella.  Excerpts from the article are below:

You would think that all this movement toward cloud and services and SOA would mean the end of things like managed file transfer and FTP. Instead, companies that offer these approaches are reinventing themselves and claiming new relevance. 

Complete article: Old Reliable - FTP Still Relevant in an SOA, Cloud World

Reducing the Complexity of Application Security

Integration is the Enemy of Security and so is Flexibility - an attribute that is essential for organizations to survive.  A corporation that cannot service its customers and suppliers, establish long sticky relationships with them and build an infrastruture that enables rapid addition of both suppliers, buyers and partners for information exchange will perish and get demolished by a nimble and flexible competitor whose infrastructure has integration capabilities for rapid information exchange.

Mike Vizard from CTOEdge talks about the business drivers that compel companies to integrate yet face security challenges that hamper integration efforts: Reducing the Complexity of Application Security

Here's a snippet from Mike's article:

"As business-to-business interactions over the Web become more pervasive, so too does the complexity associated with securing those transactions.

Unfortunately, all that complexity serves only to dissuade businesses from integrating business processes across the Web at a time when we want to encourage that behavior. So the challenge facing chief technologists is to find a way to make it simpler to integrate business processes without having to introduce complex layers of security."

Key components that help reduce (and improve) application security include:

1. Strong SOA Governance Enforecement, Monitoring and Security through XML Gateway such as Forum Sentry.
2. Portal and Web services Authentication and Authorization decisions through Secure Token Services such as Forum Sentry STS - Identity Broker.
3. Application Security Testing and Simulation through products such as SOAPSonar and SOAPSimulator for Identity, Privacy, Integrity and Penetration Testing.

Webinar on SOA Governance using Service Simulation

On Wedneday, July 30 (11:00 am EST), Crosscheck Networks is scheduled to present a webinar on Design-Time SOA Governance using Service Simulation which basically means that you can mimic a web service before it is ready. Design-Time SOA Governance serves a number of key uses such as:

1) Web Service developers can start building consumer applications before the producer services are ready. SOA Testers can build their test suites even before the producer services are ready, thereby compressing the SOA Project Lifecycle.

2) Producer Service Developers can provide a portable serivce simulation with requirements that the consumers have to meet before consumer applications are allowed to invoke the producer services. The requirement can include message formats, security and identity standards expected by the producer services. Additional Business-level requirement can also be simulated such that for certain requests, a pre-set response is returned. Enabling a library of anticiapted request-response pairs for a service ensures that consumers can build robust applications before the services are available.

3) Generating WSDL report cards is essential in measuring the relative quality of WSDLs within a SOA deployment.

For details about the webinar, visit:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/653854184

Service Simulation - Help Jumpstart SOA Testing

Here's a paper that the folks at Crosscheck Networks have authored on how Service Simulation can accelerate your SOA Testing, Client Side Development while saving you money by eliminating the need to build an expensive "SOA Reference System."

I have seen others talk about this concept in terms of virtualization and confuse everyone - I guess using hot marketing jargon helps get attention at the expense of adding confusion. The key aspects of Service Simulation are portability and ease-of-use, without which it adds more to the project timelines than what it promises to reduce.

Here's what Service Simulation is and how it helps:

"Reusable services are the cornerstone of a successful implementation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Service simulation can mimic producer services before they are implemented, an alternative to an expensive reference environment. In this paper, we cover SOA Project Lifecycle issues and how best to address them through service simulation."

For complete article, see:

Accelerate your SOA Projects Through Service Simulation

http://www.softwaremag.com/pdfs/whitepapers/Crosscheck_WP4.pdf

SOA Testing Article: Compress SOA Lifecycle through Development & QA Collaboration

ABSTRACT:

Web services, the foundation of modern SOA, are being rolled out today in ever increasing numbers across enterprises. The key benefit of web services is reusability of services across applications in a distributed environment. Reuse is especially valuable in exposing monolithic, legacy functionality as self-contained services. With the promise of SOA and web services come also the challenges for successful implementation and testing. These challenges fall directly on the developer and QA teams to meet deadlines while also deploying a robust,
resilient and reliable SOA solution.

The challenge of building robust and reliable services within a SOA exposes age-old fissures between Development and QA: Who is really responsible for testing across distributed environments.

In this article, we will explore the gaps and recommend ways of bridging such fissures to ensure greater efficiency in developing and deploying web services-based Service Oriented Architecture.

Get the Complete Article: http://library.theserverside.com/detail/RES/1202921605_546.html