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Build the Network Application Platform
Incorporate infrastructure, declarative policy, and governance to develop a successful foundation for SOA
by Chris Haddad

April 21, 2005

To be competitive, enterprises must create a business-oriented, flexible service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure that replaces the fragmented and proprietary application platforms built up over time. Organizations are creating a holistic architecture that spans applications and exposes services. The Network Application Platform (NAP) describes an architectural road map to help enterprises adopt SOA. Figure 1 provides a graphical overview of the NAP.

In essence, the NAP provides a virtual application platform that establishes a foundation for SOA. It consists of three core concepts: the service bus, the infrastructure services model (ISM), and service design practices (SDPs).

The service bus is a product-, language-, and platform-neutral managed communications infrastructure that enables access to application and infrastructure services both within and across organizational boundaries. The service bus supports any type of communication style, including one-way messages, request/response, brokered delivery, hub and spoke, and orchestrated workflow. It relies on services within the ISM to ensure proper delivery of message traffic.

The infrastructure services model is what makes the service bus more than just a basic communications pipe. It provides a host of value-added services that enable the managed environment. The ISM is a set of general-purpose infrastructure services that transparently deliver functionality such as discovery, security, reliability, transactions, transformation, orchestration, persistence, and other capabilities to applications that communicate using the service bus. The specific infrastructure functionality required by a service is defined using declarative policies and enforced automatically by the service bus.

Service design practices comprise design principles and best practices for loosely coupled, reusable services. Developers should follow these practices when implementing application services. These practices ensure flexibility, platform neutrality, and cross-platform interoperability (see Resources).