The enterprise server, or the back-end server, contains the existing core
business logic of the financial institution that is accessed by the toolkit
application. A toolkit application does not require changes to such a system
or changes to its messaging interface. This is possible because the toolkit
includes a rich set of back-end system connector components and message formatters.
BTT JCA SNA and Invoker component are provided for SNA (LUA interfaces), JMS,
EJB, WebServices, and any other customer extensions.
On the other hand, if you have already built up the SOA based back-end
system such as ESB, the toolkit enables your applications to support Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) integration.
Bank Transformation Toolkit interfaces with WebSphere® Process Server (which contains WebSphere ESB)
for business process automation and enterprise application integration. WebSphere Message
Broker and WebSphere Business
Services Fabric can be added depending on the SOA requirements. But typically,
they do not interface with BTT directly.
The entire banking SOA reference architecture includes the following flow
and control concepts:
- Channel Interaction Orchestration
- Screenflow: A lightweight Web/rich client tier control mechanism (usually
a finit-state-machine) that guides the user from screen to screen. States
and flows are encoded in XML.
- Channel Application Microflow: A lightweight Web/rich client tier control
mechanism that provides a structured way to organize channel application operations
such as screen flows, logging, reusable channel specific logic, invocation
of business processes, and invoking back-end services. Tooling is specific
to and integrated with the channel application platform. Flows are visually
designed and encoded in XML.
- Business Process Automation
- Macroflow: Long-running process or process involving human tasks to be
performed by multiple people. Encoded in BPEL as a linear process or Business
State Machines.
- Enterprise Application Integration
- Service Composition: The creation of a course-grained service from a number
of finer-grained services and simple flow logic. Usually created using SCA
components.
- Service Orchestration: Invocation of multiple services in the context
of a microflow or macroflow execution. A flow or state machine can be used
as the control construct to create a composite service from element services.
- Routing and Transformation: Routing of a service request to a service
provider at runtime according to pre-determined rules and the transformation
of the service name, number and type of parameters, and data structures as
needed so as to insulate service consumers from service providers.
- Dynamic Service Selection: Determination of how to resolve a service binding
at runtime.