Petals Platform is a middleware solution, composed of following open source software:
- Petals ESB, an enterprise service bus and the core of the platform, provided with many standards components for communication/data integration () and data transformation.
- Petals Studio, an IDE based on Eclipse, with wizards, interface and code validation all dedicated to Petals ESB environment.
- Petals View, a business monitoring software.
- Petals Master, a governance software to make the most of your services architecture.
The combined capabilities of these tools make Petals Platform a complete solution for seamless applications and services integration.
It is mainly developed by EBM Websourcing, aka {multi-excerpt:name=petalslink}{toggle-cloak:id=petalslink}Petals Link.
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{em}As the prime european editor of open source SOA integration, Petals Link has market-leading expertise in enterprise application integration and application data sharing. Our goal is to help organisations to design, deploy and manage a modern information system: flexible, agile and interoperable.
Petals Link has already provided its services to more than fifty companies and administrations.
Our flagship solution, Petals ESB, is used in Telecommunications (Orange), Defense & Security (French Air Force, French General Directorate for Armament), Health (Cegedim Activ, Almerys) and Public administrations (DGME, URSSAF, General Councils of Gironde and Limousin, City of Lyon).{em}
[http://www.petalslink.com]
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h1. What is Petals Platform used for?
As a extensible platform revolving around an open source Enterprise Service Bus, Petals Platform can cover traditional needs as well as more ambitious projects. Most companies / organisations have three typical needs nowaday:
- application integration: connecting heterogeneous applications to share data or features, automate some processes, in overall lessening the human intervention in data processing.
- mediation platform: exposing data and/or services outside one's infrastructure, to allow employees to work in travelling, providing online services to clients or partners, to gather data from external sources...
- flexible infrastructure: being able to adapt services, processes or modifying software composition (like, replacing a business-oriented solution for a more performant one) without impacting the running infrastructure.
The two first needs are being covered for years, with the help of EAI (Enterprise Applications Integrations) solutions, ancestors of today's {toggle-cloak:id=ESB history}Enterprise Service Buses.
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As for the need for an agile infrastructure, that's where [Services-Oriented Architectures|glossary:SOA] shine, and that's why SOA market soared up since the last years, while SOA as a concept gained analyst's approval. [FIXME mettre sources]
However, setting up a services-oriented architecture from an existing infrastructure can be very time&money consuming. This is where Petals Platform play its cards. Thanks to its native conception and configuration / administration / business-oriented tools, Petals Platform allows a pragmatic approach for SOA integration.
A typical SOA project using Petals Platform could be as such:
Roles (broad-grained)
Roadmap
+Phase 1: Building a small-range project to integrate Petals ESB in your infrastructure, and learn its use.+
# Draw the "map" of your infrastructure, so you can see where you start from. (Chief Information Officer)
# Define a simple case in which you could use Petals ESB (interconnect two applications, expose a service through a webportal, chain several applications's features as services to create a business process. (SOA Architect / Project Manager)
# Deploy Petals ESB and necessary components with the Petals Webconsole. (Developer)
# Create necessary services, thanks to Petals Studio. (Developer)
# If necessary, orchestrate the services to create a business process. (???)
# If planned, expose the resulting process. (???)
# Set up notifications on desired exchanges (Developer)
# Configure Petals View to monitor and retrieve desired information for further exploitation (Business Analyst)
With this, a specific part of the infrastructure has been made flexible, interoperable, SOA-ready.
# Deploy Petals Master, to set the bases for a good SOA-oriented management: build services index, create companies/users/roles, associate these data to related services.
With this, you have set up a fully functional environment with SOA capabilities, while keeping complexity and resources consumption to a low level, thanks to limited field of implementation.
+Phase 2: Once the container is installed, and you gained design/configuration knowledge, you can expand your SOA integration on a step-by-step basis, depending on needs and resources.+
# Define another use-case, in same or another business department.
# Check the Petals Master's database to find any reusable service.
# Deploy new components if necessary.
# Build services and orchestrate them.
# Set up messages notifications
# Configure related monitoring in Petals View
# Update Petals Master with new users/company/roles and services association.
E-mail
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