Service Oriented Architecture and BPEL
March 30, 2005 Narendra Patil, founder and CEO of Optimyz, and Shrikant Wagh illustrate the benefits Optimyz WebServiceTester provides to automate the business process & load testing using BPEL. As the buzz around Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is increasing within the industry, it is becoming clear that SOA simply does not mean making software components available to consume on demand or publishing software components as Web Services. SOA is more about focusing on the business logic of the software services rather than focusing on the enabling technologies such as Web Services or Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Focusing on the business process would dramatically reduce the IT infrastructure overhead and the core value around the business process would become of prime importance. The loosely coupled Web Services that are being built rapidly within organizations are representing part of the business process for the end users. However as the number of Web Services within enterprises are growing rapidly, we are quickly realizing that we immediately moved to islands of isolated Web Services from the previously non-interoperable applications. Without proper enabling technology such as BPEL, these islands of Web Services would result into a larger mess & complexity since the interdependent business services would not be able to effectively communicate with each other in a meaningful manner. We believe that SOAP XML based Web Services and BPEL together provides the enabling technologies for the SOA to be cost effective and time efficient. The heterogeneous applications within the enterprise are being exposed/published as Web Services for better interoperability and for the ability to adapt to the changing business process and requirements. In order to connect these loose coupled Web Services into a business process, BPEL has started to play a key role. While building the business process of Web Services using BPEL is key, testing the interdependent Web Services which form a business process workflow is equally important to make sure the business process functions correctly end-to-end. Companies have heterogeneity in terms of different SOAP servers and the server side Orchestration capability to interlink the interdependent business process components (Web Services) creates several limitations. First of all, the server side orchestration would enable simulating the Web Services that are deployed within a single application server. Orchestrating or simulating and testing the business process or several interlinked business processes that are residing on different SOAP servers becomes a very challenging task. Most SOAP message level testing tools today are simply looking at individual islands of Web Services. This essentially results into “unit testing” of the Web Services endpoints and operations however the business analysts does not get a feel about how the entire business process would function. In this situation, as the end users want to test the entire business process, they end up manually testing each Web Services operation one at a time. Upon completion of the operation specific unit test, the user or QA engineer has to look at the business process dependency and manually perform multiple intermediate steps before he/she can fire off the “unit test” for the next Web Services operation within the business process. As this type of unit testing of Web Services operations becomes very manual, testing a simple business process with few Web Services operations becomes a large task. As the number of Web Services and interdependencies grow, this becomes an impossible task to manage such a manual “unit testing” process. The very manual nature makes the process naturally error prone leaving the Web Services business process poorly tested. The obvious end results are long QA cycles, higher level of flaws in the testing process, higher cost and poorly tested business process. Web Services are usually consumed by a number of applications or users and it is critical to know the scalability, availability and performance of the Web Service when a large number of users are accessing/consuming it. Using SOAP message level load testing tool provides mechanism to do the scalability & performance testing of individual Web Services operations. However these tools do not provide any mechanism to find out how the entire business process would perform if a large number of users are accessing it. The traditional load testing solutions typically expect the user to do a lot of guess work by allocating and configuring different number of Virtual Users (VUs) to different operations based on the expected usage. However this guess work does not allow simulating the load in the same manner as if thousands of users are accessing the business process at the same time. It is limited to only individual operations and the QA engineer’s ability to configure and guess load level for these individual operations. Also this technique deviates from the real world situation and would not be able to detect errors that are caused due to a specific path within the business process workflow. In the end, you would be leaving your workflow or business process poorly tested from the scalability point of view and would increase the cost and manual configuration dramatically. Using BPEL based load testing of the entire business process or the Web Services Orchestration would provide scalability & performance testing in the same manner as the real world situation in which thousands of users would access the entire business process at the same time instead of the individual operations. This technique also eliminates all the guess work and manual configuration of different load levels (that keep changing as the business process changes) for different operations. Optimyz WebServiceTester provides support for both BPEL based Functional & Orchestration testing. It allows you to verify the functional correctness, scalability and performance at the operation level as well as at the business process level. Ultimately the users want to test the business process rather than islands of individual Web Services. The next few sections would elaborate in detail about how easy it is to do the Business Process Load Testing using OptimyzWebServiceTester. Source: Web Services.org USA & Canada, call toll free today at 1-800-547-4149 or just send us an email for additional information on any Web Services offered on this website. Have your website professionally optimized by the search engine positioning experts at Rank for $ales. If your site has dropped in rankings since November 16, 2003, contact the search engine positioning experts at Rank for Sales. Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it. For the best technical information on hardware, software, Internet applications, e-Commerce, B2B, Web services or IT-related industry news, visit Tech Blog. Reciprocal Link Exchange Program: If your company is engaged in the business of Web Services, the development of related Internet application, ecommerce or B2B development, Internet security services, Web hosting services or is involved in professional Search Engine Optimization, My Web Services is seriously interested in a worthwhile Reciprocal Link Exchange Trading Program with your company. Click here to get all the details.
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