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Benefits

Xcalia approaches the problem of data and service integration in a unique and powerful way, through intermediation. The services metadata and runtime engine provides two major benefits for IT teams migrating towards SOA:

Dynamic re-composition of higher-level services at runtime

Dynamic composition

By using a services metadata approach, there is no need to predefine all the chains of services during the development phase that are expected to be necessary later at runtime (a task that could be virtually impossible in fact). This leads to business applications that are more reactive and less constrained by design/development decisions as any arbitrary sequence of operations in the business layer can be potentially translated into a chain of service calls (provided the service layer is complete).

This also avoids duplicating business knowledge in larger-granularity services that are just an aggregation of lower-level services. Aggregating services becomes a common practice for IT teams starting with SOA. They want to have all the relevant information coming from the service layer to satisfy a business requirement (a visual form, a process, etc.). This is not optimal as it is time consuming and introduces duplicated code that will become hard to maintain and it is not scalable when the services layer defines hundreds or thousands of services.

Xcalia goes further as services can be dynamically assembled at runtime with no requirement to predefine these assemblies. The result is less coding in the first version of an application and even less maintenance effort when business requirements are changing: the Xcalia Intermediation Platform will automatically and instantly adapt to new business operations by dynamically generating new chains of services, instead of having to manually redefine new relevant sequences of service calls. In addition, Xcalia also delivers:

Complete services metadata: this metadata alone appears to be an appealing basis for an enterprise services repository, and it is a powerful tool to support a methodology to move to SOA.

Scalable data & service integration: unlike other integration technologies, data and services integration does not require systematic XML transformation. This is important when considering SOA for critical business enterprise applications. Xcalia’s platform is able to access information where it lives, in a transactional way.

Data and service intermediation at the business level: unlike other technologies where integration is managed at the XML level or at the database level, Xcalia manages integration at the business level. It can sit on top of a bus for data and service access to make the information automatically available in the business object model. This is a less technical approach and it puts the business models at the heart of the new information systems. It is interesting to note that our approach, where the business layer is the pivot model for data and service intermediation, is fully compliant with new development paradigms like model-driven architectures (MDA).

Support for composite applications: with Xcalia, business applications can easily access and integrate databases, XML files, Web services and legacy services (mainframes databases, legacy applications, ERP, etc.). This makes Xcalia Intermediation the best choice for enterprises to develop and deploy dynamic, transactional composite applications tightly integrated with enterprise data sources. They combine access to their heterogeneous data for new business requirements and other internal and external sources trough a manageable data access layer.

Dynamic Transactional Composite Application Environment