Emerging technologies - AJAX, VXML SOA in the travel industry

Transcription

1 Emerging technologies - AJAX, VXML SOA in the travel industry Siva Kantamneni Executive Architect IBM s SOA Center Of Excellence kantamne@us.ibm.com Tel:

2 Contents Emerging technologies AJAX, XML and SOA IBM s offerings Page 2

3 What is AJAX? Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym, Ajax (Pronounced A-jacks), is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page's interactivity, speed, and usability. - Ajax is big for one main reason. It is not server platform dependent. - The XMLHttprequest object is more reliable AJAX represents a big step toward the Holy Grail of having the kinds of speed and responsiveness in Web-based programs that s usually associated only with desktop software. - The Wall Street Journal Page 3

4 AJAX is asynchronous allows Rich Interactive Applications (RIA) Lifecycle Of A Traditional Web Application Lifecycle Of A Web Application Using AJAX: New Approach Page 4

5 Ajax Model: Partial UI Updates and Asynchronous Communications Page 5

6 Benefits of AJAX Better Performance and Efficiency the key advantage of AJAX applications is the significantly higher performance, which is a result of the small amount of data transferred from the server. This makes the AJAX technique especially beneficial for data-intensive applications (e.g. displaying rich reports, browsing through large data structures) as well as for low-bandwidth networks. More Responsive Interfaces the improved performance leads to much more responsive interfaces, which create the illusion that updates are happening instantly. As a result the AJAX web applications appear to behave much like their desktop counterparts. Reduced or Eliminated "Waiting" Time in AJAX-based applications only the relevant page elements are updates, with the rest of the page remaining unchanged. This approach eliminates the white screen (or page flicker on faster connections) and significantly decreases the idle waiting time. Increased Usability as the web application is more efficient through the use of AJAX, and the client can communicate with the server without page-loads, it becomes possible to build some wonderful user interfaces that fit much better with users needs and expectations. Users Can Work with the Rest of the Page many AJAX-based applications allow you to continue working with the rest of the page, while data is being transferred in the background. This further adds to the uninterrupted manner of the end-user experience. Page 6

7 When to use AJAX? Highly interactive applications where an application is highly interactive, it may provide benefits to use AJAX to allow the interactivity without the time cost of page reloads. A good example of a highly interactive web site is Google Maps. Parts of pages AJAX is best used in key places throughout a web site where it adds significant value. There is little or no value in using AJAX to provide the majority of your page content you may lose browser compatibility, make the application overly complex and cause problems with the site being indexed in search engines. Intranets on an internal web site the bandwidth is much higher so more AJAX usage can be successful. It s often the case that intranets involve working with data, and this is often a good application for AJAX. Online wizards linear user interfaces that collect a large series of data are a well-known challenge in web applications, and can be implemented using AJAX in a way where the user feels more in control and the application is more responsive. Data input & validation before AJAX it was hard to build anything resembling rich data input forms that give clear and accurate feedback to users. With AJAX it s possible to validate the data the user enters, while they are entering it. They can then receive feedback (using the server s intelligence) without the page being posted back. For example an validation field could check the address is valid using the DNS, without the user knowing. Data visualization visualizing large datasets on the web can be difficult because there s been no easy way to pull in more data as the user needs it. With AJAX it s possible to show a view on the data, and simply load more in as needed. Again, Google Maps is a great example. Page 7

8 IBM Leads Open AJAX Initiative IBM and a group of industry leaders on Feb 1, 2006 announced an opensource initiative to promote the adoption of AJAX technology. The new initiative, known as Open AJAX, includes such prominent supporters as BEA Systems, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra. To promote the adoption of AJAX, IBM recently proposed the Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF). ATF will provide extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for building IDEs (integrated development environments) for the many different AJAX runtime offerings, such as Dojo, Zimbra, etc. in the market, according to the project proposal. Page 8

9 What is VXML? Voice extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) is an XML-based markup language for creating distributed voice applications, much as HTML is a markup language for creating distributed visual applications. VoiceXML is based on earlier technologies from Motorola and IBM, and provides a standard interface between voice and the Internet. VoiceXML is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed-initiative conversations. The goal is to provide voice access and interactive voice response (for example, by telephone, PDA, or desktop) to Web-based content and applications. The VoiceXML Forum ( was founded to promote VoiceXML as a standard. Two closely related W3C standards used with VoiceXML are the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) and the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS). SSML is used to decorate textual prompts with information on how best to render them in synthetic speech, for example which speech synthesizer voice to use, and when to speak louder. SRGS is used to tell the speech recognizer what sentence patterns it should expect to hear. Page 9

10 AJAX and VXML working together AJAX allows us to build seamless user interfaces that dynamically pull in XML data. This development paradigm is great for VoiceXML because it will make VoiceXML and Javascript super-fast to load and only fetch that dynamic data when the application needs it. - e.g Instead of XMLHttpRequest, VoiceXML (2.x) makes this functionality a first-class citizen through the <data/> element. Now, this approach isn't really asynchronous, but that doesn't really restrict application from using it to dynamically pull in that XML data. Page 10

11 IBM s offerings in the VXML area Just as the Internet grew tremendously in the 1990s, the wireless industry is undergoing explosive growth in this decade, with over 50 million people now using wireless devices. What would it take to merge these two fast growing areas together? IBM s WebSphere Transcoding Publisher, can help in this task. It contains an HTML-to-VoiceXML Transcoder that can convert your HTML Web pages to VoiceXML for audio output to a cellular phone. Page 11

12 What is SOA? A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural framework and approach that takes everyday business applications and breaks them down into individual business functions called services. An SOA lets you build, deploy and integrate these services independent of applications and the computing platforms on which they run. Page 12

13 SOA+ Process, Workflow, Services, Components Relationships Process Models & Modules transform Workflows Services Distributed Components use expose Data Models Business Rules Roles Policies Monitoring and Business Metrics Physical Infrastructure and Operations Management Page 13

14 SOA and User Interface Support Application Requester 1 services interfaces Application Requester 2 unique adapter ESB services interfaces User Interface Applications Single Point of Entry services interfaces Applications unique adapter E Workflow Engine A B C D Package 1 package modules Package 2 package modules Package 3 package modules 3 rd Party Packaged Applications Page 14

15 Enterprise Service Bus Reference Architecture Enterprise Service Bus Message Flows (interaction patterns) Routing Data Models Mediation Primitives ACORD EDIFACT RosettaNet HL7 Cobol Copybook Communication Protocols XSLT Logging Endpoint Lookup DB Lookup Split/Merge Custom Mediation Primitives QoS Agents,Infrastructure (security, monitoring) SOAP/HTTP SOAP/JMS XML/HTTP XML/JMS String/MQ FTP Page 15

16 WebSphere ESB Messaging: MQ interoperability JMS 1.1 Clients: C++ Client WebSphere ESB.Net Client Java and C/C++ Web Services Client Lightweight Java Client coming WebSphere Integration Developer XSLT Message Logger Mediation Function Message Router DB Lookup WebSphere Adapter Support Web Services: WebSphere Application Server Tivoli Access Manager DB2 Universal Database Edge Components UDDI Web Services Gateway SCA Programming Model: SOAP/ HTTP SOAP/ JMS WS-* UDDI Registry 3.0 SMO SDO SCA Page 16

17 DataPower WebSphere Addressing SOA Deployment Needs Why an SOA Appliance? A software capability Embedded in a specialized hardware With ingenious packaging Enhancing SOA deployment run-time DataPower is an SOA appliance that uniquely manages XML increased traffic while addressing increased security requirements XI50 Integration Appliance - Expands support to non-xml solutions - Advanced architecture - Integrated message-level security XS40 XML Security Gateway - Security, agility and performance - Device can off-load application security software - Performs XML Web services security functions (parse, filter, validate schema, encrypt/decrypt, signatures, access control, and more) XA35 XML Accelerator - Offloads overtaxed servers by processing XML, XSD, XPath and XSLT at wire speed - SW provides significant performance improvements over WebSphere solutions - HW + SW provides enterprise-class performance Page 17