CFObjective: Day 3 - SOA with ColdSpring and Trans

Sean Corfield

Service-Oriented Architecture - Expose common business entities and operations to multiple clients across the enterprise.
Adobe Hosted Services "Stanza" project

These concepts might be quite useful for our "bird" project.

SOA

• Data Dictionary - Everyone needs to agree what a "customer" is.
  
• Service Directory - You need to be able to find your services.
  
• SaaS - Software as a Service - Any form of offering that is typically a desktop app, now on the web.
• 20% growth in SaaS as opposed to 6% for normal desktop software
• Often exposes an API for 3rd party apps
• SOA
• A way to structure and build systems that naturally exposes those APIs
• Building blocks for your software
• Building blocks for 3rd party software
• Like regular apps, but with a few layers
• Sounds like MVC apps
• Different because the System layer calls out to remote services perhaps on different servers

CF is a great choice for SOA - as producer and consumer of services
Web Services

• SOAP
• REST
• JSON (native in CF8)

Flex and Flash Remoting

How is SOA different?

• Client-Server by definition
• Clients are varied and can be dumb - don't need to know about your services
• Auth and sessions
• Remote clients have no sense of session
• Can't use session/client scope
• Turn off session scope to save memory
• app and server scopes are okay
• Solution is to pass tokens around
• Store tokens in DB
• Schedule task to clean old tokens
• Data Formats
• Simple XML is probably best
• JSON
• Published API definitions
• Error Handling

I will gladly admit that the rest of this presentation went rocketing over my head.  I think it actually made it into orbit.