Increasingly, the "window" through which customers, business partners, and employees view a business is a computer screen. Expectations as to what a business provides in terms of online access to services through this window or portal are increasing rapidly. And it's not enough to provide people with a consistent way of accessing the online tools they need to work, collaborate, or buy. Today's businesses stand to achieve many benefits by implementing an enterprise-class portal that provides consistent access to customized tools that improve productivity, fuel innovation, and improve customer satisfaction. This is the thinking behind the growing family of IBM accelerators for WebSphere Portal. This book provides business people and IT staff with an easy-to-read introduction to the IBM accelerators. It will start by introducing the concept of a portal, the WebSphere family, and WebSphere Portal Server. Each IBM accelerator will then be introduced and explored in terms of both the business value it provides and how it works. To illustrate how the IBM accelerators can be employed to solve business problems, three hypothetical businesses are described and then outfitted with the appropriate IBM accelerator solution. This book will help you: Understand how portals can help businesses be more successful. Learn about IBM WebSphere and WebSphere Portal Server. Get inside the IBM accelerator strategy. See the business value of IBM accelerators in various environments. Learn by watching as three businesses implement IBM accelerators. About the Author Jim Hoskins has been involved with computer technology design, implementation, and education for over 25 years. He is the author of many articles, books, and ebooks covering a wide range of technology and Internet business topics. Jim spent over a decade with IBM designing computer systems and directly helping businesses of all sizes design and implement real-world solutions. He is the author/editor of the popular "Exploring IBM" series of books, which has sold over 350,000 copies in 12 languages. Jim has a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida and resides in GulfBreeze, Florida with his wife and five children.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a major technology trend focused on making corporate information technology (IT) an enabler of business flexibility and innovation. While SOA is not the unique province of any single vendor, IBM has taken a leadership position in the industry and is actively helping organizations in many industries be successful with SOA. This book will help you migrate your existing computing infrastructure in the direction of a service oriented architecture using IBM technology and services. In Exploring IBM SOA Technology & Practice, IBM SOA expert Bobby Woolf explores IBM's vision for success with SOA. Woolf starts by describing the reasons an organization should consider adopting SOA. Issues and challenges faced once you decide to adopt SOA are examined. Guidance is given on how to prepare, select good SOA projects, and how to structure a committee to manage all SOA projects in an organization. Woolf then moves in for a closer look at the nuts and bolts of SOA including the IBM SOA Reference Architecture, the suite of IBM products/services (e.g., IBM WebSphere) used to implement that architecture, and SOA application development practices. Vital topics such as lifecycle management and governance are covered. At the "Member's Only" Web site, you will find direct links to a rich array of SOA videos, Webcasts, white papers, and other SOA resources to help your projects succeed. This book is a key resource for IT professionals and business people who work closely with IT and want to learn how to use SOA to make their corporations more successful and it shows how they can work with IBM to achieve that success.

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) style of integration involves breaking an application down into common, repeatable services that can be used by other applications (both internal and external) in an organization, independent of the computing platforms on which the business and its partners rely. In recent years CICS® has added a variety of support for SOA and now provides near seamless connectivity with other IT environments. This IBM® Redbooks® publication helps IT architects to select, plan, and design solutions that integrate CICS applications as service providers and requesters. First, we provide an introduction to CICS service enablement and introduce the architectural choices and technologies on which a CICS SOA solution can be based. We continue with an in-depth analysis of how to meet functional and non-functional requirements in the areas of application interface, security, transactional scope, high availability, and scalability. Finally, we document three integration scenarios to illustrate how these technologies have been used by customers to build robust CICS integration solutions.

Providing a foundation for enterprise architects on the principles of service-oriented architecture, this text offers guidance on how to begin transitioning an IT infrastructure toward the SOA model, an operation tightly integrated into business processes and operations.

Microservices is an architectural style in which large, complex software applications are composed of one or more smaller services. Each of these microservices focuses on completing one task that represents a small business capability. These microservices can be developed in any programming language. They communicate with each other using language-neutral protocols, such as Representational State Transfer (REST), or messaging applications, such as IBM® MQ Light. This IBM Redbooks® publication gives a broad understanding of this increasingly popular architectural style, and provides some real-life examples of how you can develop applications using the microservices approach with IBM BluemixTM. The source code for all of these sample scenarios can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/). The book also presents some case studies from IBM products. We explain the architectural decisions made, our experiences, and lessons learned when redesigning these products using the microservices approach. Information technology (IT) professionals interested in learning about microservices and how to develop or redesign an application in Bluemix using microservices can benefit from this book.

Web browsing would not be what it is today without the use of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Although much has been written about SOA methodology, this emerging platform is continuously under development. Exploring Enterprise Service Bus in the Service-Oriented Architecture Paradigm is a detailed reference source that examines current aspects and research methodologies that enable enterprise service bus to unify and connect services efficiently on a common platform. Featuring relevant topics such as SOA reference architecture, grid computing applications, complex event computing, and java business integration, this is an ideal resource for all practitioners, academicians, graduate students, and researchers interested in the discoveries on the relationship that Service-Oriented architecture and enterprise service bus share.