IDIOM Decision Suite and BizTalk Server
Business Rules and the SOA
The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a modular architecture in which the private implementations of the software modules are exposed through web services (or other loosely coupled interfaces, such as queues). The independence allowed by the private implementation of a publicly accessible module allows the software components and the business context of those modules to be more effectively managed throughout their lifecycle. Clearly, the business rules can be encapsulated in a software module and exposed as a service in the SOA. Many immediate benefits are conferred by incorporating the business rules into the SOA. The reuse of business rules by many client applications throughout the lifetime of the business rules provides an obvious gain to the business. In addition to the technical advantages of a modular architecture, the SOA allows additional business benefits to be gained through automation of business decision making. For example, automated negotiation of client contracts between different organisations, such as a broker and insurance underwriter.
The process of definition and deployment of business rules becomes independent of the runtime implementation of business rules when the business rules are exposed as a service within the SOA. The management of the business rules content can then be enhanced by a software solution that specialises in the definition and deployment of business rules. Such a software solution would ideally allow the business domain experts to own and manage the rules directly by providing them with a business accessible modelling environment to define the business rules. This modelling environment would be placed directly into the hands of the business domain experts, thereby transferring active ownership of the definition of the business rules to the ‘source of truth’ that governs the business decision making. The software would automatically and unambiguously translate the business rules definition into the private implementation that is exposed by the service in the runtime environment, as well as into business readable documents for the business user. By streamlining the deployment of the business rules implementation into the runtime environment, the domain expert can then react independently and with a minimum of delay to changes in policy or practice that affect business decision making within their domain. In a traditional system, the delay might be in the order of weeks or months. In a streamlined system using the SOA, the delay for an equivalent change could be in the order of minutes.
The IDIOM solution
IDIOM is a solution that specialises in the management of business rules. IDIOM provides a modelling environment for the definition of business rules by non-technical business users. The IDIOM product has been designed to interact in an XML environment and work within a streamlined deployment framework.
The IDIOM runtime component that implements the rules can be easily exposed as a web service. The Web Services and IDIOM whitepaper has explored the creation of the web service and the architecture of a system based on the SOA. A summary of the architecture is shown in Figure 1.
The key components of the system architecture are:
- SOAP interface – it provides a SOAP compliant interface to the underlying façade
- Web Services façade – this provides the coarse-grained business-oriented interface that client applications interact with
- Object Assembler – responsible for transforming data from an external representation (XML document) to the internal representation (DOM) used by the Decision Suite.
- Session Manager – manages any inter-invocation state that may be required
- Orchestration Manager – responsible for managing the workflow and routing within the façade. It can use IDIOM decisions to manage the workflow.
- IDIOM – the IDIOM Decision Suite runtime
Figure 1: Web Services Architecture