Prisca MOINE The Road to OSS/J SOA

Hi all,

New comer at Sun today is the end of my first week, but it is also the day of my blog's birth.

I am here for the next six months, working as intern in the OSS/J Telco team. Its objective is to promote Sun technologies and products for implementing SOA in the middelware of the telecommunication industry, the OSS.

OSS stands for "Operational Support Systems". OSS designates the software layer of a Telco service provider, situated over the hardware layer. The OSS contains all the applications and the processes of a service provider allowing it to apply a "business model" over the services it provides, i.e. to activate, to watch, to charge, etc. these services.

Currently OSS infrastructures have been developed over the years and have evolved with the needs. A few years ago no standard had been defined. Thus heterogeneous integration was not possible, each service provider was locked into one vendor. This was the reason for OSS/J Initiative birth, in which Sun takes part. OSS/J's goal is to define standard interfaces defining contracts between the applications. Then other OSS specific standards were defined. There are now gathered by the TMF under the name of NGOSS, standing for Next Generation OSS. But this first standardization step is not enough for solving interoperability and integration problems. These systems remain complex, they still have "point-to-point" architectures. No interoperability between plateforms is guaranted, architectures are not flexible.

Sun solution to this issue is to introduce a Service Oriented Architecture, SOA, in the OSS layer. The final goal is to have all the OSS processes (also defined as standard processes, called eTOM) implemented in the form of composite applications using standardized interfaces (OSS/J interfaces) so that all the different components of a process can be integrated. Beeing modular, such an architecture provides flexibility and is easy to maintain. It will represent huge save for the service providers.

Sun is leading "Java Business Integration" (JBI), a standard specification (JSR-208) for composite applications. A JBI based bus, (OpenESB), has also been defined to orchestrate SOA processes. It is developed as an open-source project.

My goal during this internship is to developp demos illustrating step by step how to migrate a point to point OSS/J architecture to a SOA JBI based one.

On the road !