Darren Wesemann Blog

In an environment where Web Services are available, an Orchestration tool can be useful to graphically tie services together into a logical flow. Often this is referred to as Composite Service Orchestration. In many cases, these tools are so well constructed that business users can construct higher-level services comprised of several available parts. Often this ability (although powerful) is billed as end-to-end orchestration, which is far from reality in most situations. An end-to-end framework must include the entire application infrastructure that has to exist eventually in order for a production deployment to occur. A single sign-on for users, administration of security, entitlements and rolls are part of the necessary Composite Application Framework. Standards such as user flow control, look-and-feel, and other interface definitions must be established in order for a resulting configuration of services to behave like a cohesive application.

The CSA establishes a Composite Application Framework with all the plumbing defined above. Services must ‘behave’ according to the defined standards, which enables ‘plugability’ into the framework without customization. This is Composite Application Orchestration, and is especially useful to SunGard, where our value is in applications, application parts, and combinations thereof.