How does Warewolf integrate into your software architecture?

We have recently gone through the process of categorizing Warewolf and refocusing our development efforts into the service bus aspects of Warewolf. This blog post explains how Warewolf fits into your existing software architecture.

 

What is a service bus?

Simply put, a service bus is a piece of software that marshals requests and responses between the various components that exist within Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). A Service bus is the common ground between the various systems and components that exist within an organisation.   An easy to understand analogy would be the following:​ A service bus is the equivalent of the guy that takes orders at a fast food restaurant. He is able to handle drive-through orders, walk in customers and telephonic orders. For each of these different types of orders, he is able to record the order, and pass it on to the kitchen, which then processes the order. He is then able to respond to a client with a relevant response. He tells the drive-through customers to go to the next window. The walk-in clients get their food, and the telephonic orders get an estimated delivery time.   It would be pretty insane for a fast food restaurant to have different restaurants and employees for each type of client order; however it seems OK for a business to have many IT systems without a common system that is able to handle all the cross-cutting concerns like security, resource management and messaging. The implementation of a service bus solves this problem and allows a company to let a single piece of software handle cross-cutting concerns while allowing developers focus on actual business functionality.

 

Where does Warewolf fit into the software architecture of a business?

Let’s start with the story of a fictional company called WidgetCo that provides virtual widgets. WidgetCo has highly advanced widget servers that connect to widget databases. WidgetCo are by far the most advanced widget builders in the world. It’s 2014 and WidgetCo’s new CEO wants to move with the times and decides that what WidgetCo needs is a new smartphone app for both Android and Apple smartphones.   WidgetCo IT has a problem. Nobody in IT can explain to the CEO why it’s going to take 9 months to create the new smartphone app. He expects IT systems to behave like the rest of his company. Accounting, for instance, is still able to shuffle around papers in a slightly different way for each new product. Why can’t IT do the same? The problem is this: IT systems rarely resemble the real world. As developers, it is in our nature to want to build new things all the time. Jane from accounting does not reinvent paper and each time a new product is released she just uses her already present infrastructure and gets the job done. WidgetCo’s current software architecture resembles something quite complex.

 

Existing software architecture:

Existing Software Architecture

The above architecture is quite complicated with a lot of duplication. The fix to this is implementing a service bus that handles the cross-cutting concern.

 

Updated software architecture with Warewolf:

Updated software architecture with Warewolf ESB

In this case, the service bus handles communication, security and load management, while removing duplication and inconsistencies. If WidgetCo included Warewolf into their software architecture, it looks much simpler and cleaner.

 

 

 

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1 Comment

  1. ESB monster

    here here for simplification . My experience with ESB is that it’s simple on the outside but once you start working with it, it complicates your life. They’re not easy to use.

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