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Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition 3.1
Technical FAQ
Technical QuestionsQ: Please describe to what extent your product has been built upon standards-based technologies (e.g., Java,(tm) XML). Describe which technologies have been employed for each product component?
A:
XML is the message format used in the integration backbone. XSLT is used for data transformation. The product does not require any particular XML message layout or dialect – this is left completely for the application architect to select and most use multiple. The code that implements the integration backbone is a combination of Java and compiled C++. The process engine and management components are compiled C++. The administrative console and script-based tools are byte code. The compiled C++ and the byte code were created using an advanced fourth generation programming language marketed by Sun as Sun ONE Unified Development Server.
Q: Please describe how your product provides the capability to route messages based on message content?
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition includes within its development environment a graphical workshop for developing process definitions. Process flows can include recursion, routing rules (expression builder and complex), Triggers and Timers, user-defined attributes with concurrency control, multiple process versions and sub-processes even across engines. Predefined process activities exist, including the First Activity, Offered Activities, Queued Activities, Automatic Activities, Sub-process Activities (representing another process), and the Last Activity. Routers are used to specify the order of the activities, and can fire conditionally based on the value of the process attributes. Timers are also available for use in process definition, including both deadline and elapsed time timers.
Q: Please describe which hardware and operating systems your product runs on. Describe any constraints or special considerations such as if certain components can only run on a specific platform. Include the operating system release and patch levels support
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Supported Platforms and System Requirements
Operating Systems
Minimum Memory Requirements 128M RAM, 500M Hard Disk Space Q: Please describe how your product provides the capability to handle delivery deadlines.
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition provides a fully integrated development, deployment, and management environment for supporting large development and integration projects. This is because you cannot do integration without development and visa versa. The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition comes with team oriented development with features such as source code control, version management, deployment control etc.
This is important because Enterprise Application Integration isn't just about managing communications between disparate applications. Just as new application development must consider the issues of how an application will be integrated with other enterprise assets, an EAI solution must consider how differentiation and competitive advantage can be achieved by developing new components that take advantage of the integrated environment. The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition is the only EAI product suite on the market that recognizes the value of both integration and development, and provides all of the tools necessary achieve these goals. The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition provides a robust object-oriented language for process automation and workflow development. The development environment uses graphical user interfaces called workshops that were developed with The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition. They consist of Repository Workshop, User Profile Workshop, Assignment Rule Workshop, Application Dictionary Workshop, Process Definition Workshop, and Validation Workshop. The Process Definition Workshop represents the process flow. Q: Please describe which interface standards (e.g., CORBA IIOP, Java RMI, COM+) your product supports?
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition fully supports communications to the Internet, Intranet, Extranet via TCP/IP messaging. It is important to note that TCP/IP messaging is the native format supported for communications between applications. The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition uses XML over HTTP as it's standard messaging protocol, which is over TCP/IP. The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition also leverages J2EE standards by supporting JMS (Java Messaging Service) in which JMQ (Java Message Queuing). The iPlanet Integration Server also has an adapter to support MQSeries and MSMQ. The product interoperates with a host of other standard, proprietary, and custom interface options. In addition to IBM MQueue, there is support for IIOP, Sockets, JavaBeans, ActiveX, C, C++, and COM. A distributed architecture was the design basis for the Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition. As long it is a TCP/IP network, the product is not affected.
Q: Please describe if your product stores information in a repository. Describe the type of information in the repository and whether the product can be configured to use a different database as a repository (e.g., files, relational databases, LDAP, etc.).
A:
Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition has the ability to utilize a wide variety of database centric third party reporting tools. The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition uses standard SQL relational databases as its persistence store, the Customer is free to use any reporting tool that it chooses, so long as it is compatible with any of the RDBMS' supported.
Q: Please describe how your product supports the export of internal metadata to XML.
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition supports XML, and by extension it supports XML in any dialect. However, it does not discriminate between differing schemas, as it uses XSLT rules to translate those XML dialects to other dialects.
Q: Please describe how your product can import and make use of externally defined XML DTDs and Schemas.
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition is the only integration solution with XML as its Canonical data format. Additionally with the use of XSLT to transform and modify the incoming XML data The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition is not tied to any object models. With XSLT any object model can be utilized allowing the application designer to choose the DTD/Schema rather than enforce any one in particular. All that is required to interact with a legacy application is a adapter that can talk to the applications API on one side and talk XML/HTTP or JMS on the other. This will then be a two-way adapter that can integrate the legacy application into the Process Definition.
Q: Please describe how your product provides flexibility in physically hosting its various sub-processes (e.g., all on the same server, or on separate servers). Describe any limitations that result from different hosting decisions.
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition can scale both horizontally and vertically, meaning both distribution across multiple servers, and multiple processors within a server. The complete workflow process runs on one engine/ one server only.
Q: Please describe how your product provides the ability to be restarted in a coherent state after a software or hardware failure (e.g., through the use of rollback)?
A:
We support hot backup in that a backup engine unit, and database units can be configured for hot backup and failover purposes. In a production system, the state information stored in the engine database is extensive. It includes information on the state of every process instance, the state of every activity and timer within each process instance, the values of process attributes and their lock states, the state of routers and triggers for each activity instance, session activity lists, and so on. The state information has to be extensive because the system automatically restores failed transactions and user back to their state before the failure.
Q: Please describe how your product supports vertical scalability (larger servers) including the ability to exploit multiple CPU's?
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition is designed specifically to meet high scalability (high transaction throughput). The Process Engine can be deployed as compiled C++ and process definitions execute as code, not slow database-stored procedures, thus taking advantage of all the processing power. The product scales both vertically (i.e., replication to handle loads beyond the capability of a single hardware platform) and horizontally (i.e., extremely long processes that may need to be spread across multiple engines-commonly seen in complex, multi-department flows). The traditional method of scaling up an application is to upgrade the servers with more processing power.
Q: Please describe how your product provides graceful recovery from failure scenarios involving software components, hardware failures, and network outages, including the ability to automatically resume in-progress work from a point of consistency without req
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition Process Engine is designed to maintain performance under heavy loads and to provide automatic recovery in case of system failure. A production engine can consist of two engine units: a primary and a backup. The primary unit handles all client sessions and business process automation while the backup unit is in a standby state. If the primary unit fails, the backup engine unit goes online, handling client sessions and connecting to the existing state database through the running database services. The Governor assists in deciding when failover should occur.
Q: Please describe how your product provides the ability to manually retry failed operations, regenerate events, and/or resend data, based on the information captured in the logs.
A:
In the Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition, if communication between the engine units should fail, the governor acts as the arbiter, switching operation to the backup unit if the primary unit is not reachable. A production engine can run as long as the governor and an engine unit or the two engine units remain in contact. Typically, the governor and each of the engine units reside on different nodes so that the engine can distinguish between network communication failure and engine unit failure.
Q: Please describe how your product supports continuous operations (24x7x365), including support for situations such as failures, routine maintenance, backups, and product upgrades. Describe any limitations or situations where continuous availability cannot
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition is designed to continuously make systems operations manageable. It includes the facility to do hot-backups, to automate load balancing and failover for both connectors and the process engine. The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition can be used to do job scheduling. We support hot backup in that a backup engine unit, and database units can be configured for hot backup and failover purposes. In a production system, the state information stored in the engine database is extensive. It includes information on the state of every process instance, the state of every activity and timer within each process instance, the values of process attributes and their lock states, the state of routers and triggers for each activity instance, session activity lists, and so on. The state information has to be extensive because the system automatically restores failed transactions and user back to their state before the failure.
Q: Please describe how your product provides facilities that permit central monitoring.
A:
We provide the Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition Process Engine Console where you can view all processes deployed on all engines. Also provided is the Environment Console, which is used to depict all participating environment nodes that have registered with the name service.
Q: Please describe how your product provides the ability to perform translation, transformation, and augmentation via a centralized facility.
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition uses XSLT and XML to translate messages and data from the applications into a format accepted by the business process.
The product uses an asynchronous process engine to allow existing application to asynchronously participate in data transfers. The reason for the addition of a process engine is because simple "fire-and-forget" rules engines are synchronous by their nature. In this scenario, a process activity (e.g., "Get Customer Information") triggers an event that kicks off an XML message that is sent through an application proxy that performs the transformation by XSLT. Q: Please describe what network protocols are used by your product. Describe how your product supports usage across a wide area network. Describe usage of broadcast oriented protocols.
A:
The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition fully supports communications to the Internet, Intranet, Extranet, and VPN via TCP/IP messaging. It is important to note that TCP/IP messaging is the native format supported for communications between applications. The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition uses XML over HTTP as it's standard messaging protocol, which is over TCP/IP.
Q: Please describe how your product enables automation of business processes, including internal (private) processes and external (public) processes.
A:
In the Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition , business processes are defined graphically as connected graphs of work activities using The Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition process definition workshop. These are deployed into the test and online application environment using tools supplied with the product. Individual work activities can be carried out by local applications running within the firewall or external applications. In addition, a business process instance can be initiated by both internal and external users or application and access control for this operation is supported.
Q: Please describe how your product supports long running business processes without requiring undue resource consumption or unrealistic operational procedures.
A:
In the Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition, the process engine portion of the product anticipates that all business process instances will run for an indeterminate time and consist of an indeterminate number of activities (nodes in the connected graph of the process definition). Internal memory objects and information in the persistent state database are created only when an individual activity is encountered during execution and is discarded when the activity is complete. Thus, the resource consumption of the engine is limited to the amount of actual work in progress rather than the size/complexity of process definitions or the amount time any instance has been running.
Q: Please describe how your product supports recoverable business processes including the ability to automatically resume a process after a failure or temporary error has occurred.
A:
In the Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition, the default configuration of the process engine is to persist all runtime state into a relational database. For highest performance, a copy of frequently used objects related to process and activity state is kept in memory. When these objects are created, changed, or deleted, a record of the operation is written into the database. The write operations are carefully designed so that the externally-apparent state of each process instance is consistent with the database. Thus, recovery of the state of all process instances is guaranteed.
Q: Please describe how your product supports both simple (pass-through) and complex (multi-step, conditional) business processes.
A:
In the Sun ONE Integration Server, EAI Edition, process definitions can be any connected graph of business steps. This includes full support of splits, joins, sequential, and parallel operations. Any and all of these can be conditional on data values and external application pertains, time, and/or manual interactive operation. Simple (pass-through) processes are a degenerate case of complex and thus are supported.
Q: Please describe your product's online help documentation. Describe how contextually relevant help is provided.
A:
The products all support on-line help with context-sensitivity. The help is extensive and includes both a Help Menu and CD-ROM.
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