CODA Financials WCF LOB Adapter
What is CODA Financials?
“CODA provides award-winning Financial Management solutions that help organizations to streamline and automate their finance processes (from accounting and procurement to reporting and analysis) and to achieve better compliance and corporate governance. CODA applications work seamlessly with each other or independently and they integrate with other leading operational systems to maximize the return on your broader IT investment too. And our products are all underpinned by expert consultancy, training and support services, delivered by teams of experienced accountants, business analysts and technology specialists.
Founded in the UK in 1979, the CODA Group now employs more than 600 people and has offices around the world to deliver easy, local access to sales, service and support. Around 2600 medium and large organizations, across all sectors, use CODA solutions to control costs, drive performance and ensure compliance, whilst remaining agile and responsive.”
Why a CODA WCF LOB Adapter for BizTalk?
More often than not, mostly in these times of mergers and acquisitions, companies rely on heterogeneous environments, legacy systems and multiple back-ends on distinct technologies. Companies are complex informational systems, with many flows between internal departments, with external partners and between applications. Raw data becomes information, gets structured, transformed, presented and consumed by a variety of entities for many reasons. An LOB (line-of-business) application is one of the set of critical computer back-end applications that are vital to running an enterprise, such as Oracle, SQL Server, SAP, CODA, Siebel, PeopleSoft.
While BizTalk is the right middleware platform to practically solve any number of LOB related interaction scenarios, a BizTalk LOB adapter is a more intelligent and useful implementation of the support for an LOB application. The adapter encapsulates the functionality needed to interact with that LOB application, implements specific business logic and legacy aspects while abstracting a cohesive and standard service oriented capsule of contracts exposed to the rest of the world. The adapter is perceived by the consumers as a regular WCF service and can also be used from BizTalk and any number of other compatible platforms. The WCF programming model is enough to consume this adapter, requiring no additional learning curve, no matter how cumbersome to deal with and outdated the legacy system behind is in reality.
The WCF Line-of-Business (LOB) Adapter SDK is a collection of runtime engine and tools to help Adapter Developers in creating service-oriented interfaces to existing LOB applications using WCF. The goal of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK is to facilitate uniform development of reusable metadata-oriented WCF-based adapters that enable enterprise applications, databases and messaging platforms to integrate with each other. The Adapter SDK is based on WCF Channel Model and it surfaces an adapter to a LOB application as a WCF Binding.
The Adapter Consumer can access an adapter like a typical WCF Service and doesn’t have to learn a new programming model. The same adapter developed using the Adapter SDK can be reused in multiple .NET applications including Custom WCF Client Applications, BizTalk Server, SharePoint Server and SQL Server Integration Services (via adapter developer provided ADO.NET shim). In addition, this SDK provides a common facility for Adapter Developers to expose rich LOB metadata to the Adapter Consumers, who can selectively browse, search and retrieve WCF contracts from this available metadata in the adapter.
What is Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)?
The concepts behind WCF have been around since Microsoft introduce them under the code name “Indigo”. The official WCF API was officially presented to the public with the .NET Framework 3.0, in December 2006.
Windows Communication Foundation(WCF) is an SDK for developing and deploying services on Windows. WCF provides a runtime environment for your services, enabling you to expose CLR types as services, and to consume other services as CLR types. Although in theory you could build services without WCF, in practice building services is significantly easier with WCF. WCF is Microsoft’s implementation of a set of industry standards defining service interactions, type conversion, marshaling, and various protocols’ management. Because of that, WCF provides interoperability between services. WCF provides developers with the essential off-the-shelf plumbing required by almost any application, and as such, it greatly increases productivity. The first release of WCF provides many useful facilities for developing services, such as hosting, service instance management, asynchronous calls, reliability, transaction management, disconnected queued calls, and security. WCF also has an elegant extensibility model that you can use to enrich the basic offering.
WCF provides a high level of interoperability via SOAP messaging and additional extendable encoding system for the messages. WCF offers a unified and consistent approach to handle programming communication options for distributed systems.