Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) Project
The Open Integration and Interoperability Framework for ALM Tools
The Problem
- Application development today is achieved through the use of numerous
tools from software vendors, open source communities and some are even
home grown. Getting these tools to work together is an integration problem
that has never been solved. Each vendor and open source project creates
their own API standards and many hours of effort are required to create even
the most straightforward of integrations.
These integrations are often the most fragile part of the application
development instrastructure stack and when they fail they introduce serious
productivity reductions.
The reason these integrations are so fragile is that it requires every publisher
of tools in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) arena to keep track of
dozens of other publisher's products' versions and API standards. With new versions
of ALM software products being released every week this is a daunting challenge.
What is needed is a common integration and interoperability framework so that
software publishers need only worry about integrating to one point, the integration
framework, and to one standard, a web services oriented one.
The Solution
- For improved productivity, quality, and to reduce the risk involved in
the development and deployment of applications, IT infrastructures need
to be highly integrated and interoperable providing enterprises with the
freedom to select the best-in-class technologies and tools.
A more modern and scalable approach is to create a
multi-layered interoperability framework leveraging SOA technologies.
Tools can be orchestrated to provide repeatable, efficient processes
that are responsive to changes in business needs by building upon an
interoperable and collaborative collection of services and components.
The tool provider can expose as much (or as little) as they choose and
the consumer of these technologies will have the ultimate control over
how these technologies are orchestrated together.
Technology
- The Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) Project enables development
and IT tools to be orchestrated in support of the consumer’s business
needs. ALF provides the logical definition of the overall
interoperability business process. This technology handles the exchange
of information from one tool to another, the business logic governing
the sequencing of tools in support of the application lifecycle process,
and the routing of significant events as tools interact. ALF achieves
this by providing a common infrastructure (SOAP Web Services, BPEL
orchestration engine and the ALF Event Manager), and a set of domain
vocabularies that define the events, objects and attributes. Together
these address the issues of tool interoperability and
interchangeability, process segmentation, reusability, and versioning.
ALF provides various Common Services (logging, notifications, security,
etc.) that are easily integrated into BPEL processes to create richer
interoperability processes.
Read the full description of the project objectives, project plan and
architectural approach also read about how ALF and Corona (Document
and
Presentation) work together.
