BEA Systems’ most recent release of the AquaLogic Data Services Platform, version 2.5, is an evolutionary addition to the ALDSP product line. Building on a solid foundation, BEA has added a few key features, addressing perceived weaknesses in standalone service-enablement products.

For instance, BEA has realized that, at least for now, SOAP/HTTP-compliant Web service transports between the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and service enablement layers in a SOA (services-oriented architecture) can be slow; sometimes so slow that performance is degraded. To resolve this, BEA has added an “Enterprise Information Bus,” an integration transport between ALDSP and the AquaLogic Service Bus. The transport uses RMI (Remote Method Invocation) to optimize performance, pass credentials and maintain transactional context. This level of integration lets BEA leverage its SOA stack and isn’t found in other standalone EII products we’ve seen. However, ALDSP still supports the standard Web service transport for integration with other ESB packages.

Improving Client Access

BEA’s ALDSP also differentiates itself from other products in the area of client access protocols. Where other setups provide client access over ODBC, JDBC and SOAP (Web services), ALDSP also connects to clients through Java objects (Java/SDO mediator API) and ADO.NET services. This support allows for tighter integration into client-side applications and development environments. Although, in theory, tight coupling of this sort is generally frowned upon, the realities of enterprise deployment and usage sometime dictate that theory take a backseat to the pragmatic. These practical issues include tight development schedules, previous vendor lock-in, performance concerns and other decisions not always driven by or answerable to IT.

ALDSP offers functionality similar to the other leaders in this arena, including using WS-Security for Web service security; providing visual toolsets for data and service design, creation, testing and analysis; and support for XQuery and XPath. In addition, BEA has joined with other vendors in providing data-source connectors for enterprise applications, such as those from PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel, and links to other applications is on the road map. Seamless integration of this type eases deployment and development of data services within the enterprise. BEA also provides configurable data caching, integrated analysis tools for code refactoring (simplification), and operational monitoring for performance analysis and service-level agreement support. The query plan created by ALDSP is easily accessible and, as with other similar products, can be optimized within the design environment and supports using RDBMS-specific functions if needed. Furthermore, ALDSP supports composite (virtual) views of the source data, performing joins at the most logical layer as determined by the query optimizer. This is often done on the ALDSP server, but if the sources both reside within the same RDBMS, for example, the join can be performed where it is most efficient-in the RDBMS itself.

Customer-Specific Access

ALDSP offers several other features. Updates can be managed down to the data element level. Furthermore, ALDSP provides data redaction, or hiding, based on the consumer’s credentials. If the consumer is not authorized to view Social Security numbers in the service provided by ALDSP, for example, the SSN is invisible. Likewise, if a consumer isn’t allowed to view account balances greater than a predetermined number, say $10,000, those fields will be hidden from that consumer. This degree of data protection isn’t found in the other data-service platforms. ALDSP’s performance was acceptable on our test machines. We rarely experienced lag, and compile times were as we expected. Deployment of compiled objects was easy to use and completed in acceptable time frames. ALDSP management can be done over a Web interface, with easy-to-follow screens and extensive help; through the command-line, which is quite useful for scripting; or through a Java API. The development environment provides all the functionality we’ve come to expect from toolsets like this, including integrated debugging, multiple source views (including visual tools) and source control integration.

The author is is a software programming consultant with a consulting firm. Write to him at ppayne@nwc.com. Post a comment or question on this story at nwc.com/go/ask.html.