Data delivery in a service-oriented world: the BEA aquaLogic data services platform

"Wow. I fell asleep listening to SOA music, and when I woke up, I couldn't remember where I'd put my data. Now what?" Has this happened to you? With the new push towards service-oriented architectures (SOA) and process orientation, data seems to have been lost in the shuffle. At the end of the day, however, applications are still about data, and SOA applications are no different. In this paper, we present BEA's approach to serving up data to SOA applications. BEA recently introduced a new middleware product called the AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP). The purpose of ALDSP is to make it easy to design, develop, deploy, and maintain a data services layer in the world of service-oriented architecture. ALDSP provides a new, declarative foundation for building SOA applications and services that need to access and compose information from a range of enterprise data sources. The paper covers both the foundation and the key features of ALDSP, including its underlying technologies, its overall system architecture, and its most interesting capabilities.