Delivered at SYS-CON’s SOA World West/Virtualization Expo 2007, Mittal described how bringing the value of virtualization into the cycle of SOA application development requires a new approach of simulating the behavior of services through what he called Virtual Services.
The new practice, called Service-Oriented Virtualization, or SOV, is a strategy of simulating the real-world behavior of software assets that comprise an SOA application, thereby decoupling development and testing teams from their dependence on deployed services and their underlying implementation layers.
While the practice of virtualizing hardware and test beds has created significant IT cost benefits, we are missing much of the potential value of virtualization as it applies to the SOA lifecycle, Mittal said. By virtualizing the behavior of services with SOV, the extended development and test team can break the boundaries of limited access to live services and data, solving a primary stumbling block for SOA success.
With the release of LISA 4, the company said it now offers a way of creating and using the Virtual Services needed for SOV practices. The iTKO LISA Virtual Services Environment enables parallel development cycles for distributed SOA teams by both simulating services from a WSDL, and further, emulating the behavior of services and their underlying systems.
The company estimates that this will reduce the cost of software licensing, support, and maintenance by between 60% and 80% per additional team test environment.
LISA VSE enables a team to create or capture Virtual Services that look and act like standard WSDL-defined or other underlying services such as ESB, Java objects, and databases that SOA applications can connect to. These Virtual Services are actively running and implemented on an instance of the LISA Server instead of the implementation hardware, so they can be accessible for design, development, and testing activities whenever and wherever they are needed.