Cheap Alternatives for SOA - Part 3 - Workflows

Post date: Mar 28, 2014 10:34:45 AM

Especially long running business processes lasting for several months and years represent the best candidates in favor of acquiring a proprietary SOA framework. However, if the interactions of these business processes do not include a myriad of disparate systems requiring complex routing and protocol translation then the vendor lock in might not be worth.

A carefully chosen open source framework such as JBPM, Sarasvati or OpenSymphony OSWorkflow could be employed to implement the most encountered workflow patterns realizing business scenarios.

Error handling, compensation and asynchronous interactions are the main concerns in the context of these long running processes. Another important aspect are transactions especially in the context of long running processes. Persistent delivery modes and durable subscribers help in achieving high levels of reliability even if expensive middleware is not used and reliance is kept on JavaEE JMS implementations as part of application servers.

In order to take an informed decision, a cost benefit analysis needs to be carefully performed. However, there are three main things to consider which if answered positively leads to a rather in house made/open source solution in favor of a proprietary platform:

1. Do you lack disparate system integration (with various platforms and languages, complex routing, different protocols) needs?
2. Do you want to sell your solution as product and by doing so to extend deployment to various platform types?
3. Do you have access to developers qualified in workflow and enterprise integration patterns?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then proprietary SOA should be avoided at all price in order to win in the long term and more often than not the goal should be the long term, shouldn't it?