The Van: The Power of Cocoon for Web-Enabled Knowledge Sharing
ABSTRACT
Today's fast-paced organizations must be able to deploy new business-critical solutions rapidly and cost-effectively, as well as enable data to be available in a pervasive and ubiquitous fashion. By adopting computing frameworks, IT groups can play a major role in enterprise business processes integration by addressing the scalability, manageability, security, market readiness, and efficiency of the development stages.
1. The Van: The Power of Cocoon for Web-Enabled Knowledge Sharing
There are only a few frameworks on the market capable of achieving such a level of enterprise application integration. IBM's Network Computing Framework (NCF), Microsoft's BizTalk/Distributed Internet Applications Architecture (DNA), and Sun's SunConnect are the major ones. But recently, Virtual Access Networks announced the development of a new breed of framework, duded FORCE, or Framework for Open Redirection of Content Exchange. Although similar, these technologies are not equal. Therefore, understanding the enterprise integration requirements and the technology underlying these frameworks is very important when choosing among them.
Especially for the vertical industries and financial environment, platform independence and scalability is very important because it often includes support not only for horizontal systems, from supply chain to distribution channels, but also for vertical ones, including ERP and CRM systems. Frameworks also must be able to scale across heterogeneous platforms and systems. In addition, manageability becomes critical when applied to the financial environment because services require tight integration and are often delivered by a multitude of suppliers.
When evaluating these frameworks, interoperability is the key issue. Both IBM's NCF and SunConnect solutions are based on open standards, primarily Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and CORBA, while Microsoft's DNA/BizTalk is based on Windows NT/2000 run-time environment as well as COM/DCOM/SOAP. NCF runs on IBM platforms and relies on EJB as a port to the Internet, but its run-time environment is tightly integrated with IBM's platform, making interoperability with other platforms questionable. Unfortunately, NCF is not yet fully ported to Windows NT/2000, but IBM does plan to continue to port to it.
As for Microsoft, the company has market share in its favor. Microsoft's environment and APIs are considered open, largely because they are widely adopted. Although Windows NT/2000 and COM are not easily ported to other platforms, they do support applications developed in any language. In addition, the solid COM/DCOM/SOAP environment is the building block that will enable independent solution providers (ISVs) to develop complex applications very rapidly. Beware, however, of the integration between Windows NT/2000, Windows 9x and Windows 3.1, which demands significant efforts, making the deployment of DNA/BizTalk in a multi-version Windows environment complex to maintain and administer. Microsoft's recent announced.Net architecture should address these issues.
Sun's framework is more customized for the financial industry than its contenders. Sun's goal is to persuade partners to develop their core components for SunConnect's framework, which allows for any core service to be supplied by any vendor, a feature no other framework has. Being completely platform independent, Sun's framework model also provides highly transactional applications using Java and CORBA, which enables a tight integration with other platforms and environments, including legacy systems.
2. Enters FORCE
Framework for Open Redirection of Content Exchange (FORCE) is a new, state-of-art technology developed by Virtual Access Networks, totally based on open standards, namely eXtensible markup Language (XML) and Cocoon (HTTP/Java/XML), which enables the creation of agents targeted at all kinds of online listings and databases, allowing them to be moved from one database facility to another, independent of its platform.
Today's heterogeneous business network environment requires framework solution not to be tight to any operating system platform, language or even vendor. Virtual Access Network's framework is totally agnostic to operating systems platforms because its environment is fully Web-enabled. All it requires from a client is its ability to load and run a browser connected to the Internet or Extranet.
Financial and health institutions, for instance, must take advantage of the pervasive state of the Internet and its ability to interconnect a multitude of platforms. Thus, the need for moving financial/health contents among several systems, within a same organization and across its boundaries becomes a desired feature. Nowadays, it's common for different financial organizations to exchange financial contents, either as partners or through a variety of alliances, as well as a result of a business merge.
To date, none of the frameworks discussed here are capable of fully moving data across heterogeneous platforms. Java-based SunConnect does a great job crossing diverse business platforms, but it is not extensible enough to redirect contents dynamically from one platform to another. It works well with middlewares, and established platforms, such as from a Windows NT/2000-based environment to a UNIX-based one, and so forth. But it has its limitations when more than one platform or content format (disparate databases, operating systems, wrappers, etc.) is involved.
By using The Van, Virtual Access Network's FORCE takes advantage of open technologies such as XML and XSLT, to format disparate contents and move it anywhere, across any operating system platform, over the internet, via HTTP protocol. It then takes advantage of Cocoon to generate XML server pages (XSP) to intelligently detect the format of the content a client requires, format it accordingly and securely deliver it to the client. Contents are automatically compressed, encrypted and delivered through a secure shell (SSH) tunnel to any HTTP, WAP, PDF, or any other required format.
With Virtual Access Network's FORCE's smart agent application institutions have a stable XML framework capable of gleaning data from any Web-centric environment, providing a powerful tool for any Internet content extraction (ICE). FORCE agents can act as ICE discovery tool, a content (or data) miner and as an information integrator. The creation of ICE cubes, or scheme oasis of information, allow these FORCE agents to find out what sort of question they can ask a given XML domain. The use of XML allows us to dictate how entities like software agents can talk and exchange information, as well redirect it.