Big Science SOA, and Not a Web Service in Sight

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June 25, 2007

Big Science SOA, and Not a Web Service in Sight

Web services may offer the path of least resistance to SOA, but theoretically, are not essential to SOA.

SOA is now being employed for the monitoring controls for Europe's largest particle accelerator, but employing Java-based technologies versus Web services. And all seems to be humming along nicely.

Particle accelerators at the CERN ((European Organization for Nuclear Research) are monitored by an event-driven service-oriented architecture (SOA) system based on Java Messaging Service (JMS) and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB).

A new TechTarget report describes the center's Technical Infrastructure Monitoring (TIM) system, which is SOA built on Java standards and technology, versus Web services standards and technology. The system monitors vital signs such as temperature and pressure within the accelerators including the new 17-mile Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator. IN the event of failure, an alarm will sound.

The SOA-based system takes readings from 30,000 gauges and publishes them to an enterprise service bus. Technicians at workstations and PC browsers -- as well as autonomic systems and auditing databases --subscribe to the service readings.

The TIM system is built on Apache servlet engines, Oracle application servers, and uses the SonicMQ JMS messaging technology from Progress. For desktop views, which mostly go to technicians at workstations, but also includes browser-based systems, CERN used JViews from ILOG Inc.

"This is a huge system of very different types of equipment," Peter Sollander, technical infrastructure operations department manager at CERN, is quoted as saying. "There are 30,000 data points coming from 100 different local systems. We process 1.3 million value changes per day. That's the throughput we're dealing with. We plan that it will go up with the introduction of new systems, new data sources."

Interestingly, as the system is built on Java/JMS-based services, no Web services standards are in use. "This is very much event-driven SOA, but there are no Web services in use," said Hub Vandervoort, CTO of the Enterprise Infrastructure Division at Progress Software Corp.

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us