SOA concepts and Workflow OO Classes: Hybird Service Enablers?

[Mike Gambier]

Fellow WUGgers,

 

We're considering launching ourselves into the SOA age over here and are starting to build the various layers inside SAP to cope with such delightfully exotic things as proxies, service classes, GDT mappers and application objects to suppor processing XML/SOAP interfaces. Woo :)

 

All neato stuff but it occurs to me that the innermost layer of our SOA framework could be quite powerful if it was also 'Workflow-enabed'. By that I mean our SOA Application Objects could support both services and Workflows if they became proper encapsulations of Business Logic that are open to all calls, both internal and external.

 

At the same time I'm also trying to convince people that some of the richness of the 'old' BOR framework should be kept in our new SOA Application Objects. For example, the ability for objects to 'know' about each other within a logical relationship (Parent/Child/Sibling). Has anyone any tips in this area? 

 

My current leanings are to abstract the relationships so that common 'GetRelationships' or 'GetParents' or 'GetSiblings' or 'GetChildren' methods could be modelled and possibly implemented on all of our Application Objects and become the OO equivalents of instance virtual attributes that could always be accessible if not actually implemented for every object.

 

We obviously want to avoid very heavy instantion and buffering of our Application Objects so I expect a lot of the attributes they possess are likely to be hidden behind accessor Public Methods and hit the databse on demand only. But even the concept of a unified 'Key' is quite a challenge in OO to support if we want to move away from an 'old' SWO_TYPEID string. Has anyone thought up a way of even doing that without having to resort to a TYPE ANY?


Being a novice to the 'new' OO representation of Business Objects my only other intention at the moment is to consider adding IF_WORKFLOW as a common interface on the Superclass for our Business Objects to inherit as standard. But perhaps there are other things I need to consider too?

 

Do we have any 'standard' OO Business Objects to examine and plunder?

 

Regards,

 

Mike GT

 

 

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