Does anybody know what data SAP Enterprise Services actually expose?

Anybody know where I could get the mapping of SAP database table & field names to data elements in the WSDL of a standard SAP Enterprise Service? It seems our SAP technical consultant is unable to determine this without manually opening up the ABAP code that comes with SAP. The element names in the Enterprise Service are long English names which are quite different from the German acronym-like names of the standard SAP databases that all the SAP functional consultants are familiar with. It seems very painful to figure out what data is actually being exposed by the Enterprise Service.

Copyright © 2011 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Back to the Real World After China

About 6 weeks ago, I completed one of the most challenging 10 months of my entire 26+ year career. I helped create the Enterprise Service Bus for a major Chinese company and during that time I made six trips to China and spent a total of 4.5 months there. I joked with friends that I did not live in the "real world" anymore because I would have never believed that anyone would actually pay me to work in China for so long. I did, however, learn a lot about globally distributed teams, ESB's, SOA, and the culture clash of trying to make people from China, the US, Canada, and India all work together.

In particular, my job was to help integrate their website with 3rd party service providers and their SAP back end. My resume is now full of references to XML, web services, canonical data modeling (XML schemas), WebSphere Message Broker, and WebSphere Process Server.

It was a heady time but I must confess I'm glad its over. It has taken me several weeks to get back into the groove and sit down and take some time to blog again.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

WebServices and SOA Security

I had the good fortune to complete a second week of SOA-related training in Pittsburgh last week. (See also The Many Flavors of IBM ESB Implementations). One of the instructors was Tony Cowan, a frequent contributor on IBM's developerWorks website. I was particular interested in his discussion of security in SOA implementations. I would like to point my readers to a series of four recent articles on implementing web services security on WebSphere Application Server Version 6.x. These four articles seem to have lots of good security-related information for those of us who aren't security experts, regardless of whether you are a using WebSphere Application Server or not. (This is especially true for part one, which Tony wrote.) Check out:

Introduction to security architectures
This article introduces various IBM® WebSphere® Application Server Version 6 Web services architectures, considering them strictly from a security perspective.

Using Username Token and SSL
In Part 2 of this series on Web services security, you'll learn about one of the most common ways to secure a resource: using a user name and a password. You'll learn about the UsernameToken Profile and how to use it with Web services using IBM WebSphere...

XML encryption and digital signature
In Part 3 of this series on Web services security, learn the steps required to implement XML Digital Signature and XML Encryption in a Web service using IBM® WebSphere® Application Server and IBM Rational Application Developer.

Using the LTPA token
Learn how to use the Lightweight Third Party Authentication (LTPA) token to secure a Web service using IBM WebSphere Application Server V6 in Part 4 of this series on Web services security.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Incredible Web Services Performance Achieved

I ran into a co-worker I had not seen in a while last week at IBM Software University 2006. He has a major US Bank as his customer. He told me how they were pushing the envelope of web services performance by running the WebSphere software stack on their mainframe using multiple (I think it was 13 of them) zSeries Application Assist Processors (zAAP) for the mainframe Java virtual machines. They just ran a performance test for a web service enabled IMS legacy system transaction. (SOAP messages over HTTPS in through the web/java/JCA/IMS layer and back) The workload was driven by the WebSphere Workload Simulator, recently renamed the Rational Performance Tester for zOS. The ran 1000 transactions per second while achieving a 0.1 second average response time. Granted, the bank does not have this in production but this sounds like a big step forward in web services performance to me.

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.