Intel® Software Network

The following diagram illustrates the platform extensibility framework within Intel SOA Expressway.

SOA Expressway Extension Points



Intel SOA Expressway’s unique architecture allows for application architects to extend platform features by coding custom interfaces and services to perform customer-specific business logic. SOA Expressway supports an optional JVM for Axis2 and JBI based services. On the Windows platform, support for .NET custom components is also planned. This extensibility allows SOA Expressway to pull in other services in the architecture as custom local services that can be called from the WS-BPEL workflow

In addition, custom interfaces can be written to receive messages from clients and sent to external service endpoints on non-standard protocols. It should be stressed that SOA Expressway uses the extensibility framework for optional business processing and does not use Java for any high performance processing such as high-speed workflow execution or XML acceleration.

Software Extensibility

A common stopgap measure for solving SOA performance and integration bottlenecks is a hardware-based appliance. While appliances may offer a temporary solution, they don’t properly support SOA agility, which is a big promise of SOA. Intel® SOA Expressway is a flexible and extensible software appliance that can be extended using common technologies such as Java, Axis 2, JBI and JMX and .NET

Requirement	Hardware Appliance	Software Appliance
Network Performance Agility	(-) Higher hardware refresh costs (-) High TPS/Watt usage over general    purpose servers.	(+) Expandable NIC ports for Enterprise datacenter network segmentation and performance (+) Expandable for additional purpose-built processing boards (Crypto) (+)  Scalable on easily   upgradeable servers (+) Virtualizable for increased datacenter efficiency
Business Processing Agility	(-) Impossible to add custom business   processing on the appliance without a  new feature request   (-)  Latest standards on hardware must wait for a full-cycle upgrade (-) Hardware appliances mean that for new features you are at the mercy of the vendor!	(+) Easily extensible for custom business processing – without going to the vendor (+) Extensible protocol support (+) New features are added in a software upgrade, without a hardware dependency
Development Agility	(-)  Distributed development teams  require additional appliances just for development purposes – appliances can’t be virtualized like software.	(+) Test and development platforms available through shared virtual appliances
Security Agility	(-) Latest security standards on hardware must wait for a full-cycle upgrade (-) Additional monitoring, security and management software can’t be added to the hardware appliance (-) Appliances are often “security by obscurity” with custom operating system kernels that don’t undergo widespread security analysis (-) Even when appliances use a standard O/S new security vulnerabilities mean the customer must rely on the appliance vendor for a patch	(+) Security patches for the O/S are  instantly available (+) Additional security monitoring and management tools can be easily added to   the O/S without impacting the software appliance (+) Runs on standard operating systems with widespread security analysis (+)