Soa Browser – assorted How-To

Some videos have been recorded with an older version of Soa Browser that didn’t have the “Interconnections” tab.

What do you see in the “Assets Tree” of Soa Browser (identical to the Assets Tree of the Portfolio Window in Reconciler). How the hierarchical views can be rearranged?
The view of the application landscape initially shown in Assets Tree is a hierarchical representation (a tree structure) of entities relevant to interconnections in the application landscape. All registered organizations are represented in the top-level nodes, starting with the organization that owns the application landscape (the “Home Organization”). Other organizations are those owning application components and services that are interconnected with internal applications (that are owned by the Home Organization). Organizations consist of “Business Units” and those entities are direct owners of applications. An application may have multiple versions, and these can be deployed and execute in multiple runtime environments. Applications expose Services (possibly with multiple versions) and Services are accessed by via Endpoints (interconnections that are not service-oriented – queues, topics, etc. – are not shown in the Assets Tree). This view can be customized.

Composite application components
SoaScape supports the notion of a composite application components (in ArchiMate’s terms, an application component composed of other application components using “composition”). The main purpose of having these entities is the alignment with Application Portfolio Management tools (application registries); applications may be registered there on a higher composition level than in SoaScape. An application in SoaScape either represent the same real-life entity as the application registered in Application Portfolio, or it is a part of it.

SoaScape Reconciler enables you to align with an application registry  (an Application Portfolio Management tool) and import application properties via MS Excel. Applications are identified by their names – it is assumed that the names are equal (if there is no exact match, Reconciler matches the name by fuzzy algorithms). Additionally, the user may use the ownership information (business units). The composite applications have to be identified by the user

The application landscape can be shown in 3D, as a network of applications and services. This view facilitates exploring of application dependencies. It is also possible to also show dependencies of composite entities – organizations, business units and composite applications.


See also: Exchange with ArchiMate tools