SOA Governance on the SAP Discovery System with HP SOA Systinet & SAP NetWeaver PI

Posted by Michael Koegel Oct 20, 2010

HP and SAP currently run a joint Co-Innovation Lab project to update the integration of HP SOA Systinet and SAP NetWeaver Services Registry and bring that to the new SAP Discovery System v4 that features both HP and SAP software out of the box.

Join us for a Expert Session 281 on this project at SAP TechEd 2010 in Las Vegas.

We will explain the overall SOA lifecycle and the additional benefits that a Systinet user can get by the integration while conserving all the great Designtime Governance features that the Enterprise Service Repository provides.

As a pre-reading you might take a look at our previous Whitepapers on the topic:

Looking forward to see you.

Using the HP SOA Systinet Plug-In with SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio

360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – Using the Composite Application Framework (CAF) of SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1 EhP1 to implement the provided Enterprise service (Part 7c)

Posted by Michael Koegel Jan 7, 2009

In the 360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – NetWeaver Developer Studio Installation and Update (Part 6) we prepared our development environment with the installation and update of SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio 7.1 (NWDS). In this blog we use the updated Enhancement Pack 1 (EhP1) Version available here, but the installation is pretty much the same so we'll ommit it here.

Now we are going to use new NWDS of SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1 EhP1 to implement the business functionality that the service will expose with the Composite Application Framework (CAF) as shown in the attached screencam and explained below.

Missed out the first part(s) of the series? Start up with 360° View on enterprise SOA : Provide and consume your own enterprise services- Introduction (Part 1).

This blog series describes how to reengineer "existing offerings into a set of well-governed, harmonized and technology-agnostic enterprise services", to ultimately consume these. This installment shows the service implementation starting with the configuration of the environment and the actual implementation and deployment of these services.

What are we going to implement?

For the scope of the implementation you can refer back to the original 360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – Implement the provided Enterprise service within the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio using Java (Part 7) of the blog series.

How do we do it?

In contrast to the original implementation that used plain JavaEE technology we now use the Composite Application Framework (CAF) and leverage some new features like the Enterprise Service Repository Browser to retrieve the service definition that we created in the previous steps. We will also use Development Components (DCs) as the base for our projects.

We can only scratch the surface on implementing Enterprise Services in this blog. There are many more aspects that need to be considered.

If you plan to adopt this approach for your product or custom development we encourage you to attend the SOA300 training in an SAP University location near you.

Screencam Storyboard: Provisioning Enterprise Services with CAF

1. Import reference application

We rely on the functionality of a reference application and reuse it to implement the Enterprise Services.

2. Create DC projects

The new projects will be based on Development Components.

3. Convert projects

In order to be able to use the existing reference application in a clean way we convert it to DCs. In the future there will be more automated support for this conversation.

4. Adjust DCs

5. Create CAF project

6. Import WSDL from ESR

Use the Enterprise Services Repository Browser to get the WSDL of the designed services.

7. Service Implementation

Create the actual Java code. This is almost identical to the original code in Part 7 as the underlying implementation for CAF Application Services are EJBs.

8. Classify services

Do the classification right from the Composite Tools.

9. Deploy

Deploy the Development Components.

10. Test service

Use the WSNavigator to test the service.

11. Summary

In a nutshell: From having your IDE ready -> your Enterprise Service implemented, classified and deployed with CAF.

You've seen that CAF based development is even more convenient then with the plain JavaEE approach and you learned about Development Components.

From here you can go to 360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume you own Enterprise Services - Consume your Enterprise Services within Visual Composer (Part 9) to see the usage of the services in Visual Composer.

In the following the links to the other blogs from the series:

Retrospect of the ES Community Advisory Group Heterogeneous SOA

Posted by Michael Koegel Dec 19, 2008

During the TechEds in 2007 we conducted a couple of Use-Case Identification sessions with a wide range of customers and partner to identify the pressing challenges they face while integrating SOA infrastructure from several vendors.

The discussions and priorization led to the following list of focus topics:

Repository coexistence
Registry coexistence
ESB coexistence
End-to-end monitoring
Using Non-WS protocols in a SOA environment

To look into these topics in greater detail we formed a Community Advisory Group with the charter to "Enable customers to embrace enterprise SOA while honoring their existing SOA investments and create a mutual understanding of Partners and SAPs approach to SOA" with the following member companies:

Airbus (Customer)
B-en-g (Partner)
Cardinal Health (Customer)
Cognizant (Partner)
DB Systel GmbH (Customer)
ECS GmbH (Partner)
HP (Partner)
Intelligroup (Partner)
Nike (Customer)
Wipro (Partner)

During the first half of the year we had face-to-face meetings with the group in Walldorf, Palo Alto and Bangalore and regular online conferences in between. The meetings where geared towards getting feedback on latest developments from SAP (SOA Middleware Roadmap, SCA, SOA Testing etc.) and learning about the scenarios that Customers and Partners see in their usage of SOA.

As results of the discussion we build up a Heterogeneous SOA Reference Landscape in the Co-Innovation Lab to prove the integration of certain components of a Heterogeneous SOA Landscape.

More details can be found in the blog How to deal with heterogeneous eSOA Landscapes that will also link to the results of the ESB co-existence project that should be available early next year.

For the Registry integration we worked closely with HP as the first partner and created two documents that outline the integration of HP's registry with the SAP Services Registry as well as the usage of HP's registry tooling from within the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio.

The overall topic as well as the sub-project for ESB co-existence run by Peter Kulka where presented during the TechEds. The session Applying Enterprise SOA in Heterogeneous SOA Landscape is available as recording.

Based on a Survey with the Advisory Group we also created a more comprehensive survey on Heterogeneous SOA that was open for participation to all active ESC and SDN members.
Highlights from the results include:

55% of the participants are already beyond the explore phase in their SOA adoption.
Non-SAP services in ESR is an important topic.
Almost 2/3 of the participants see ESR as their primary repository. However for less then 1/3 the same is true for the registry.
SAP NetWeaver PI will be the primary ESB for more than 50% of the participants
There is a strong interest in SCA.
52% of the participants are planing to use SAPs methodology for service design.

We will continue to work on additional projects in the realm during 2009 to get further results on ESB co-existence, End-to-End Monitoring and SOA Governance. Eventually there will be a second phase of the Advisory Group to cover latest developments in the industrie as well as in the SAP produce portfolio. So stay tuned.

I'd like to thank all Participants for their great contributions as well as Jochen Vatter from the ESC Team for supporting this Advisory Group.

Using the HP SOA Systinet Plug-In with SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio

Posted by Michael Koegel Dec 8, 2008

In my How to Set Up an Interoperable Scenario with SAP NetWeaver Services Registry and HP SOA Governance Systinet Registry Foundation I've introduced you to the document "How to Set Up an Interoperable Scenario with SAP NetWeaver Services Registry and HP SOA Governance Systinet Registry Foundation" that explains how to link the Services Registry of the ESR with the HP Systinet UDDI Server.

The latest document "HP SOA Systinet Plug-In for SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio", also created in a joint Co-Innovation Lab project, explains how to install the HP SOA Systinet Plug-in for SAP Eclipse IDE into your NetWeaver Developer Studio and how it can be used.

As with the infrastructure integration the beauty lies in the combined capabilities without adding overhead. So instead of having to switch back and forth between SAP and HP tools you can do your work from one environment - the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio.

If you're subscribed to the Virtual TechEd 08 you might want to watch Applying Enterprise SOA in Heterogeneous SOA Landscapes for some background on the Heterogeneous SOA initiative that provided the framework for the joint work. Also check out Peter Kulka's blog "How to deal with heterogeneous eSOA Landscapes" for more on the general topic.

360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – Enterprise Service Provisioning on SAP NetWeaver Using Apache Axis Web Services Framework (Part 7b)

Posted by Michael Koegel Oct 3, 2008

In the blog series we outline how to model and develop Enterprise Services with SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1, but what about the previous release NetWeaver 7.0 can that be used as well?

Find out by reading on and downloading the detailed document created by our colleague Hans-Joachim Odlozinski.

Missed out the first part(s) of the series? Start up with 360° View on enterprise SOA : Provide and consume your own enterprise services- Introduction (Part 1).

This blog series describes how to reengineer "existing offerings into a set of well-governed, harmonized and technology-agnostic enterprise services", to ultimately consume these. This installment shows the service implementation with the help of Axis2 and the deployment of these services.

Please see the 360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – Implement the provided Enterprise service within the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio using Java (Part 7) part for the background of the services we're going to implement.

How do we do it?

Download and install Axis2 from http://ws.apache.org/axis2
Download and install Ant if you don't have it (http://ant.apache.org/)
Use the WSDL2Java tool to create the skeletons for you service from the WSDL
Implement the service in the generated Java class
Generate the *.aar file with "ant jar.server"
Package the resulting file in a WAR and then EAR file
Create a J2EE Library with the NetWeaver 7.0 Developer Studio for Axis
Deploy both the Axis2 Library and the EAR file containing the service
Validate and configure the Aixs2 runtime
Upload the *.aar file created earlier with the Axis2 web frontend
Test your service

To get the full step-by-step details please read Enterprise Service Provisioning on SAP NetWeaver Using Apache Axis Web Services Framework

Why is this so complicated?

First of all NetWeaver 7.0 and it's tools doesn't have the capability to generated a web service top-down from a existing interface description (WSDL). So we add this functionality to the stack using the Axis2 framework. Second Axis2 comes with a different version of some common libraries that are also part of the NetWeaver Java Server, but in a different version. The resulting classloading conflicts has the be worked around with a slightly more complex application architecture consisting of a library and an application.

The good news is that some of the steps above need to be done only once and subsequent service implementation will be much easier.

The easiest solution however is to move up to SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1 if that's feasible for you.

In a nutshell: From having your WSDL handy -> running your service on SAP NetWeaver 7.0

You've now implemented the Enterprise Service modeled in Part 5 using Axis2. Publication and classification of the service into a existing Services Registry needs to be done manually.

From here you can jump to Part8 for a view on the Services Registry or Part 9 if you want to start using your service with Visual Composer.

In the following the links to the other blogs from the series:

How to Set Up an Interoperable Scenario with SAP NetWeaver Services Registry and HP SOA Governance Systinet Registry Foundation

Posted by Michael Koegel Sep 10, 2008

In a joint project between HP and SAP run in the Co-Innovation Lab we created a How-to Document on the integration of both companies Service Registries.

The beauty of the integration is the usage of HP Systinet Foundation as the underlying UDDI v3 server for SAP's Services Registry. That means you get both the functionalities of SAP SR and HP Systinet without dublicating the data stored in the registries. With that you can avoid running into inconsistencies that might occur with traditional copying of registry content.

Be sure to read the document "How to Set Up an Interoperable Scenario with SAP NetWeaver Services Registry and HP SOA Governance Systinet Registry Foundation" now available.

If you're subscribed to the Virtual TechEd 08 you might want to watch Applying Enterprise SOA in Heterogeneous SOA Landscapes for some background on the Heterogeneous SOA initiative that provided the framework for the joint work. Also check out Peter Kulka's blog "How to deal with heterogeneous eSOA Landscapes" for more on the general topic.

Get those Global Data Types into your ESR

Posted by Michael Koegel Sep 8, 2008

If you're interested in SAP's SOA journey you might have found the Global Data Types Catalog (12MB) on the Explore Enterprise Services part of SDN. This mighty 10.000+ paged document gives you an great introduction to the topic plus all the details that you'll ever need. However if you want to work with these Global Data Types to e.g. define your own service reusing them you'll find your ESR lacking them.

To get the GDT Content you can go the Software Distribution Center on Service Marketplace http://service.sap.com/swdc (Login and license required) and follow the path shown in the Screenshot below.

Download->Support Packages and Patches->Entry by Application Group->SAP Application Components->SAP ERP->SAP ERP ENHANCE PACKAGE->SAP ENH PACK 3 FOR SAP ERP 6.0->Entry by Component->ESR 7.10

As an alternative you can also search for "XI CONTENT SAPGLOBAL".

Download the two ZIP files found under XI CONTENT SAPGLOBAL 2.0 and XI CONTENT SAPGLOBAL MODEL 2.0.

If you extract the ZIP files you'll get two *.tpz files that can be imported using "Import Design Objects..." from the Tools menu of the Enterprise Services Builder.

For details on the import please refer to Import an Enhancement Package Service (EhP) into Enterprise Services Repository (ESR) and create a Web Service Client by Matthias Kretschmer.

Once you're done the content will be available as shown below and you can start exploring and using it.

Heterogeneous SOA @ TechEd '08

Posted by Michael Koegel Aug 24, 2008

If you're reading this because the headline attracted you you're most likely already working on heterogenous SOA environment or looking into the topic.

In that case we would love to get you input via the Heterogenous SOA survey that we currently conduct to get a better understanding on the market state and requirements.

Please click Heterogeneous SOA Survey and spend a couple of minutes to tell us your view on the topic.

If you would like to learn more about the current work that's going on in the area of heterogenous SOA please join our talks at TechEd.

SOA205 Applying SOA in Heterogeneous Landscapes
(Las Vegas | Berlin | Bangalore)

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the trendsetting paradigm for architecting enterprise system landscapes nowadays. With best-of-breed and multi-vendor strategies applied to the landscape community members face a new set of integration problems. The challenges include:

Repository coexistence
Registry coexistence
ESB coexistence
End-to-end monitoring for multi-vendor SOA middleware
Using non-Web service protocols in an SOA environment

In this session we will discuss these challenges and outline how SOA can be implemented in such an environment with products like SAP NetWeaver Process Integration and SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment. We will also briefly share experiences from integration projects and show how the Enterprise Services Repository can be applied in such a setup.

SOA300 Co-Existence of Enterprise Service Buses From Multiple Vendors in Your SOA Landscape
(Las Vegas | Berlin | Bangalore)

Developing enterprise applications following the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is not only popular, but almost common these days. Most sophisticated and complex enterprise applications will leverage services that are either developed by customers, systems integrators, or provided by multiple software and applications vendors. In many cases the resulting system landscapes comprise multiple Enterprise Service Buses (ESB) that need to interact with each other. In this session we will discuss possible scenarios to integrate SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 with other ESBs in multi-vendor SOA landscapes based on open standards. We will also present the results and experiences that were gained in real partner projects. To make this session more valuable, live demos are planned. Finally, this session will provide an outlook to future integration scenarios. As a take-away, the audience will get a good understanding on possible integration scenarios of ESBs and their challenges as well as ways to address these challenges using standard technologies.

The planned structure of the technical session is as follows:

Introduction and definition ESB
Motivation: Why is the integration of co-existing ESBs necessary and important
Overview and discussion of different integration scenarios
Examples and experiences gained from customer projects, including live demos
Open issues, future work
Summary: Current state, limitations, and outlook

I'm looking forward to both you feedback in the survey and meeting you in person at TechEd '08.

360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume you own Enterprise Services - Consume your Enterprise Services within Visual Composer (Part 9)

Posted by Michael Koegel Jul 14, 2008

In the 360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise Services – Publish, discover and test the Enterprise Services within the Services Registry (Part 8) we configured the Enterprise Service, published them to the Services Registry and tested them within the Web Services Navigator.

Creating a Visual Composer based Composite Application that uses the delivered Enterprise Services is covered in the attached screencam and explained below.

Missed out the first part(s) of the series? Start up with 360° View on enterprise SOA : Provide and consume your own enterprise services- Introduction (Part 1).

This blog series describes how to reengineer "existing offerings into a set of well-governed, harmonized and technology-agnostic enterprise services", to ultimately consume these. This final installment will cover the consumption of the Enterprise Services with Visual Composer.

What are we going to do?

First we create the three destinations that are required by Visual Composer (VC) to access the Services Registry (SR) with the help of the Destination Template configuration in the NetWeaver Administrator (NWA) as described in the documentation.

Then we use the Web Services Administration to configure the Endpoint of the Services.

Once we're done we can bring up VC and start modeling. Note that VC requires the Microsoft XML Toolkit (MSXML) and the Adobe SVGViewer to be installed locally to the browser.

In VC we create a new model and then query the interfaces of our Enterprise Services (EventManagementQueryCourseIn and EventManagementQueryEventIn) from the Services Registry. From the search result we can just drag and drop the service operations to the canvas. On the services we drag out the forms and tables required for our model.

After finishing the model we can switch to the layout view and beautify our UI. At last we deploy the application and test the Flex version of it.

The screenshot below shows what you'll ultimately get.

Screencam Storyboard: Consuming Enterprise Services with Visual Composer

1. Configuration of Services Registry for use with Visual Composer

2. Modeling the consumption model

Creating the Model
Lookup Services in the Services Registry
Modeling the Application
Changing the Layout
Deploying the Application
Testing the Application

3. Summary

In a nutshell: From having your running services -> testing and getting a neat UI

After you configured and tested your Enterprise Services using the NetWeaver Administrator and WS Navigator in the previous block you can now create Visual Composer models and use Enterprise Services retrieved from the Services Registry to create Composite Views that search and display business data.

In the following the links to the other blogs from the series:

360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise Services – Publish, discover and test the Enterprise Services within the Services Registry (Part 8)

Posted by Michael Koegel Jul 8, 2008

In the 360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – Implement the provided Enterprise service within the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio using Java (Part 7) we implemented the business functionality that the service will expose and deployed it to the runtime.

How to make the services available in the Services Registry and test them there will be covered in the attached screencam and explained below.

In my next post you learn how to use Visual Composer as part of SAP NetWeaver CE to retrieve the services from the Services Registry and consume them in this rapid application development environment.

Missed out the first part(s) of the series? Start up with 360° View on enterprise SOA : Provide and consume your own enterprise services- Introduction (Part 1).

This blog series describes how to reengineer "existing offerings into a set of well-governed, harmonized and technology-agnostic enterprise services", to ultimately consume these. This installment will cover post deployment steps required to publish the services into the Services Registry and test them from there.

What are we going to do?

At first we use the Web Service Administration being part of the SOA Management/Business Administration in NetWeaver Administrator (NWA) to configure an endpoint for the newly deployed services. Enterprise Services always require authentication for security reasons and the tooling is supporting you with the configuration. Having to configure the endpoint explicit is a security precaution that avoids unintended exposure of newly deployed Enterprise Services.

As a second step we create a Publication Restriction also using the NWA that indicates that the contained Enterprise Services are to be published in the Services Registry.

After the services are published which might take some minutes depending on the background job that does the work we can locate the new services in the Services Registry. From there we can just use the Test button on the Endpoint tab to start the web services navigator (WS Navigator) which allows us to test interactively.

With all that done we're now ready to put a nice UI on top of the services which we will cover in the next installment.

Screencam Storyboard: Configuration, publication and testing of Enterprise Services on SAP NetWeaver CE

1. Configure Service

Endpoint Configuration
Create Publication Restriction

2. Locate Services in the Services Registry

3. Testing the Services using the web services navigator

In a nutshell: From having your services deployed -> testing them with WS Navigator

After you implemented, classified and deployed your Enterprise Services using NetWeaver Developer Studio in the previous block you can now configure it properly to expose an authenticated endpoint. Additionally you've learned how to publish the services to the Services Registry and start the web services navigator from it to test your services.

In the next part of the '360° view on enterprise SOA series' I will show you how to use Visual Composer to consume your newly created Enterprise Services.

In the following the links to the other blogs from the series:

360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – Implement the provided Enterprise service within the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio using Java (Part 7)

Posted by Michael Koegel Jun 23, 2008

In the previous installment of this blog (360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – NetWeaver Developer Studio Installation and Update (Part 6)) we prepared our development environment with the installation and update of SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio 7.1 (NWDS). Now we are going to use NWDS to implement the business functionality that the service will expose as shown in the {code:html}attached screencam{code} and explained below. In my next post you will learn how to configure, publish and test the implemented services using various capabilities of SAP NetWeaver CE. Missed out the first part(s) of the series? Start up with the introduction blog (360° View on enterprise SOA : Provide and consume your own enterprise services- Introduction (Part 1)).

This blog series describes how to reengineer "existing offerings into a set of well-governed, harmonized and technology-agnostic enterprise services", to ultimately consume these. This installment shows the service implementation starting with the configuration of the environment and the actual implementation and deployment of these services. h4. What are we going to implement? {code:html}

360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – NetWeaver Developer Studio Installation and Update (Part 6)

Posted by Michael Koegel Jun 22, 2008

In the 360° View on enterprise SOA: Provide and consume your own enterprise services – Model and define your own Enterprise Services (Part 5) we finished modeling our Enterprise Service. Now we need to prepare ourselves to implement the business functionality that the service will expose. In our case we will use the NetWeaver Developer Studio (NWDS) that comes with SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1 to do so.

Missed out the first part(s) of the series? Start up with 360° View on enterprise SOA : Provide and consume your own enterprise services- Introduction (Part 1).

This blog series describes how to reengineer "existing offerings into a set of well-governed, harmonized and technology-agnostic enterprise services", to ultimately consume these. This installment helps you to get prepared for the actual implementation of the service and introduces the convenient feature of the NetWeaver Developer Studio Update Server.

The attached screencam shows

where to find the installation on your DVD
how to download and install SUNs JavaSE 5 SDK as prerequisite for the installation
the installation of the Developer Studio 7.1
and the update to service pack 4

Optionally you may use JavaSE 6 as the underlying runtime for the Developer Studio 7.1 from Service Pack (SP) 3 on.

For the update we make use of the Update Server described in detail in the article "Distributing Development Tools Made Easier: The New Update Server for the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio". The actual URL you need to provide for the update is https://nwds.sap.com/swdc/downloads/updates/netweaver/nwds/ce/710/site.xml.

Note that you need to have a user account on http://service.sap.com/ in order to use the Update Server.

As I'm writing this the SP5 is already available and the SP6 is just around the corner, but the good thing is that you don't have to care as the Update Server always shows you the latest available version. If you want to find out the SP plans visit https://service.sap.com/sp-stacks and click the SP Stack Schedule link at the very bottom of the page.

With the installation done we're ready to embark on the actual implementation which will be covered in my next blog.

Screencam Storyboard: Installation and Upgrade of SAP NetWeaver CE Developer Studio

1. Introduction

Recap what was done so far

2. Installation

SUN Java Development Kit download and installation
NetWeaver Developer Studio installation

3. NWDS Update to SP4

Using NetWeaver Developer Studio Updateserver: https://nwds.sap.com/swdc/downloads/updates/netweaver/nwds/ce/710/site.xml

In a nutshell: From your own enterprise service -> Preparing your enterprise service implementation

After you learned how to use the Enterprise Services Builder in combination with SAP's design and modeling methodology in the previous blog. You can now explain how to install and update NetWeaver Developer Studio and are now prepared to make your first steps toward the implementation of your Enterprise Services.

In the next part of the '360° view on enterprise SOA series', I will show you how to use SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio to implement a Enterprise Service in Java based on the service WSDL that we're going to download from ESR with integrated tool support.

In the following the links to the other blogs from the series:

michael.koegel

SOA Governance on the SAP Discovery System with HP SOA Systinet & SAP NetWeaver PI