WebServices dot org

Reducing Complexity Through FusionWare Integration Server

There must be 50 ways to Web services-enable a legacy system, and at least 500 ways for consultants to make money off companies attempting to do so. While I don’t mean to knock the consulting profession (I am one myself, after all), there are some things companies should be able to do on their own. That includes extending new data sources to applications, or bringing on new electronic trading partners. I’ve heard accounts of companies taking up to six months trying to agree on formats and protocols before exchanging purchase orders and acknowledgements – an exercise that must have put many a consultant’s child through college.

FusionWare comes to market with more of a “do-it-yourself” philosophy in mind. The company, with roots deep within the non-relational multivalue database space, understands what it takes to open up a legacy system. This heritage is significant for a very straightforward reason. Pick databases are known to be deployable and manageable by any end-user, with no DBAs or other technology expertise required. Try running an Oracle with no Oracle DBAs or developers on hand. Pick systems were named after a pioneering data architect named Dick Pick, who eschewed overly technical approaches to business problems. Remarkably, Pick designed and refined his database model on paper, not on a machine. (This was the 1970s, and computers were hard to come by.) From then on, multivalue databases became the embedded engines behind thousands of applications, and were virtually unknown to users, since they just ran, period.

That’s why any company dealing with a history of developing and supporting legacy databases and systems knows how to stay focused on business needs, knowing that clients have no stomach for getting mired in the technical details. Most companies using non-relational databases either don’t have IT departments or have very small IT operations. FusionWare is now bringing this business sensibility to a broader market – companies with any database that needs to quickly establish Web services links without breaking the bank.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with CEO Alan Davis, and as he puts it, “A non-programmer, or somebody who's more of an analyst than programmer, can put together a business process workflow and implement an application with very little training.” A COBOL programmer that knows next to nothing about XML or Web services could be a FusionWare expert in three or four days, he says.

Is the product as easy as they say? I took a test run of FusionWare, and found it to be a fairly intuitive Web services building environment, much like Visual Basic. The ideal person most likely to benefit from the tool is someone under pressure to deliver or call some Web services, stat, with no other resources available, and doesn’t want to have to learn Java or the .NET languages. The tool automatically identifies documents, and includes an XPath generator, query builders, XSLT wizards, and backend adapters. The product comes in three components: FusionWare Designer, a Windows-based integrated development environment; FusionWare Server, the deployment server, and FusionWare Administrator, for monitoring and managing the Web services environment.

FusionWare executives point out that many companies these days are likely to find their hands forced by trading partners. Being able to take mulitple partners’ proprietary documents and process them internally in a standard way is no problem with FusionWare. With the FusionWare Designer, users do not actually have to write code; they simply fill in a form, and are prompted to include the proper data elements and services. Designer then generates the code for them. The workflow may involve identifying data within a proprietary database, and making the data available to the application at hand. When additional trading partners come online, the program already provides the structure and format and so a simple transformation easily performed with the XSLT wizard is all that is needed to add a new partner to the system. The entire process takes a few minutes.

A lot of the talk with Web services development these days, of course, centers around Service Oriented Architecture or Service Oriented Integration to reach an SOA – the ultimate abstraction layer between legacy systems and Web services. FusionWare’s environment forms such an abstraction layer that shields end-users from the ugliness of database integration. As Gayle Moss, director of product management at FusionWare puts it, “A lot of abstraction takes place within the Designer. You can connect to any backend system and work with the data, regardless of the original format because the system converts everything to XML. Once in XML, developers can easily manipulate the data and develop business processes and workflows with just a point and click interface. Once the application is completed, the Designer takes care of converting the data back into its original format.

FusionWare executives stress that no application or database type is beyond their grasp. The solution “connects to any database, connects to COM, connects to Java, and connects to Web services you might already have or that your partners might already have,” says Davis. “Companies are faced with two choices: either figure out a smooth way of integrating all of these disparate environments, or go to the expense of standardizing them across the company.”

FusionWare offers a different approach than many of the legacy-to-Web services solutions currently on the market. Many integration environments require a robust middleware tier – consisting of a separate Windows, Linux, or Unix server that can run replicated business processes while accessing backend data repositories. Other vendors offer tools that will either wrapper or recompile libraries of legacy code into Java or a .NET-friendly language. Such approaches, of course, are non-trivial tasks for any IT shop. FusionWare’s server – with a mere three-megabyte footprint – can be plopped on any connected server and be put to work.