SOA Tips-What is a Conversation in a collaboration wire-design

SOA-Tips

When doing wire-design for global collaborations, you have to think about how to establish Conversation. Typically in a eBusiness context, a single delivery of the message is not enough to achieve the business purpose. There is some interaction of messages involved between collaborating partners that ends up resulting in some unit of activity. These interactions of messages can therefore span multiple HTTP sessions that require a business-level correlation and are essentially peer-to-peer message exchanges.

So when designing global collaborations for wire-centric integration, you have to think about:

1. The roles of the participants,
2. What correlations you are trying to establish between them,
3. What is the lifecycle of this conversation – what starts the conversation, what maintains the conversation, what completes the conversation, and
4. The shared state that is implied to exist within the context of the conversation.

The conversation is a new computing context that you will have to think of in wire design.