The IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric Assembly Process

The IBM® WebSphere® Business Services Fabric product provides a synergistically governed environment that enables administrators, architects, business analysts, and developers to collaboratively assemble and deliver business services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) system. The WebSphere Business Services Fabric assembly process provides a high-level view of how to develop, deploy, invoke, and optimize business services using the product.

The WebSphere Business Services Fabric assembly process in Figure 1 displays this process.

Figure 1. WebSphere Business Services Fabric Process to Develop, Deploy, Invoke, and Optimize Business ServicesThe WebSphere Business Services Fabric assembly process
Related concepts
Business Services
Product Overview
Related reference
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Notices and Trademarks

A Quick View of the Setup Activities

To start using WebSphere Business Services Fabric, you must perform the following setup activities after the product has been installed. You cannot use WebSphere Business Services Fabric until the setup activities have been completed.

  1. Configure federated sources: Once WebSphere Business Services Fabric is installed and running, an administrator must configure the system to integrate it with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) repositories (if they are being used). If your system uses only IBM Business Services Repository, then skip this step and start with step 2.

    Performed by the administrator in the IBM Business Services Governance Manager.

  2. Grant users access to WebSphere Business Services Fabric: To begin using WebSphere Business Services Fabric, an administrator must enroll an organization and its users in the system. Subsequently, the administrator must perform business service entitlement for its users by enrolling organizations and users in the business services to provide access to them.

    Performed by the administrator in the IBM Business Services Subscriber Manager > Manage Subscribers.

The process to develop, deploy, invoke, and optimize business services

The WebSphere Business Services Fabric process spans end-to-end business service development activities from conceptual design to rollout to the users. The process is as follows:

To learn more about these activities, see the documentation provided with each module.

All WebSphere Business Services Fabric modules must be installed and running before you begin this process. The process steps are listed below.

  1. Define a Fabric project

    WebSphere Business Services Fabric activities are carried out within the scope of a project. Each project is configured to be associated with metadata content and the team that maintains that content. Different types of projects can be created for different kinds of content. At the start of a development project, an administrator must create a new project of type Business Service, assign a team to it, and allocate namespaces for the instances belonging to that project. Other kinds of projects are used for industry content, federated sources, and ontology extensions.

    In this step, the administrator must also assign namespaces, that is business service metadata locations, to each Fabric project. Namespaces are categorized by the type of metadata they store. Typically, a project has at least one namespace of type Instance for storing instances. If the project holds subscribable business services and enrollments, then it should have another namespace of type Enrollment to store enrollments and subscriptions to those services.

    Performed by administrator role in the IBM Business Services Governance Manager > Configure Projects business service.

  2. Configure project namespaces

    The administrator must also determine which namespaces provided by other projects should be visible and usable by the new Fabric projects. A project's imported namespaces enable users of that project to see and refer to metadata stored in those namespaces. As a project evolves, it might require instances from other projects, and it might be required to expose some instances in a namespace for other projects to consume. The administrator can revisit these requirements at different stages of the project.

    Performed by administrator role in the IBM Business Services Governance Manager > Configure Namespaces business service.

  3. Create a project in IBM Business Services Composition Studio

    An IBM Business Services Composition Studio user updates the project workspace to download the latest repository version into the workspace. The user then selects a project from the list of projects available to the user's team. Updating and selecting a project sets up the user's project environment. Once the environment is set up, the user can create metadata instances within the project's owned namespaces, previously defined in governance. Instances from namespaces imported from other projects are read-only.

    After an administrator sets up a Fabric project with its users and namespaces, the Fabric project team, including architects, developers, and business analysts can instantiate business service metadata such as its business services, Web services, and endpoints.

    Performed by developer and architect roles in the IBM Business Services Composition Studio.

  4. Create, edit, test, and submit metadata

    Any changes made to business service metadata have to go through the governance process for approval. After the service metadata has been instantiated for a Fabric project and its environment is set, a team member can submit the changes to the governance process for approval.

    Performed by developer and architect roles in the IBM Business Services Composition Studio.

  5. Approve or reject metadata changes in governance

    The governance administrator reviews the business service metadata changes, approves them, and publishes them to the repository. The administrator can also reject the changes if they conflict with existing metadata.

    Performed by administrator role in the IBM Business Services Governance Manager > Manage Changes business service.

  6. Enroll users and organizations in business services

    This step assumes that the application artifacts in a project are approved, the deployment activities are complete, and the business services defined for that project are enrollable and subscribable.

    Subsequently, an organization administrator enrolls users and organizations in business services, which will enable them to access (invoke) services.

    Performed by administrator role in the IBM Business Services Subscriber Manager > Manage Subscribers.

  7. Invoke a business service

    Assuming that the application is running in a production environment, a business service user invokes a business service. Using the metadata of the business service, the IBM Business Services Dynamic Assembler invokes the best available endpoint. It considers the user, the business service, the content of a request, and the policy applied to the business service; it then returns a suitable response. For example, a suitable response might be the invocation of an endpoint within the response time appropriate for a customer's level of service.

    IBM Business Services Dynamic Assembler

  8. Analyze and optimize business service performance

    An application administrator can access the business service performance reports and fine-tune the performance of the service.

    Performed by administrator role in the IBM Business Services Performance Manager.