PushToTest announced the results of a research paper, entitled "The Composition Approach for Large-Scale SOA," which analyzes approaches to service oriented architecture (SOA) and evaluates SOA development and deployment solutions from leading vendors, including Oracle, IBM, BEA and TIBCO Software. In implementing a test use case across all of the solutions, PushToTest has concluded that SOA success requires service composition and service virtualization approaches to development and governance. In the study PushToTest found that TIBCO's ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks products offer lower total cost of ownership (TCO), a better architecture for large-scale SOA development, deployment, and management, and less hassle for developers overall.

"In 2007 we observed a trend among the 160,000 people in our open-source community that software developers, QA testers, and IT managers are looking for a better way to develop, orchestrate, deploy, and manage services," said Frank Cohen, CEO and Founder at PushtoTest. "Our research explores a new composition approach to building SOA services and provides a methodology to evaluate today's tools in terms of developer productivity and ease of deployment and management. The analysis shows that TIBCO is the leader in understanding service composition and service virtualization and is building products to meet enterprise needs."

PushToTest evaluated SOA development and deployment tools and platforms from four leading software publishers, including Oracle, IBM, BEA and TIBCO. PushToTest looked beyond the typical marketing claims to understand the skill sets, domain expertise and specialization required to be successful in each platform. A variety of metrics were carefully recorded in the course of implementing a use case across the competing solutions, ranging from system setup and service construction through deployment, policy management and quality assurance. The primary metric, and a key to understanding cost of ownership for integration projects, was the time and effort required to complete each activity.

PushToTest today published all of its research in a free open-source SOA Knowledge Kit, including step-by-step developer journals, SOA use case implementation source code, and load and performance scalability tests. The SOA Knowledge Kit took PushToTest four months to engineer and package.

PushToTest's methodology for its SOA evaluation defines a real-world use case to include the following mandatory criteria:

• orchestration of services
• long running process
• requires connectivity to JBI, SAP, JMS, SOAP services
• uses medium to large payload sizes defined by complex schemata
• must be able to be instrumented as a scalability test
• requires reliable messaging (RAMP)
• uses document-oriented container architecture

Key findings from the study include:

• Large-scale SOA initiatives with dozens to hundreds of services must address a complex network of services, written in a variety of languages, tools, and patterns, and residing in multiple hosted environments. Success requires a composition approach to servicedevelopment, and an architecture that separates governance from service development.
• Service Virtualization is an emerging architecture intended to host heterogeneous services, including Java and .NET.  Service virtualization separates application business logic from the underlying technical implementation, including transports, governanceand deployment details.
• Oracle, IBM, BEA, TIBCO tools have major differences in developer productivity and deployment.  TIBCO's platform independent architecture is better suited for large-scale SOA initiatives that must deal with the complexity of deploying and managing servicesacross heterogeneous platforms.

PushToTest publishes all of the code, methodology, test suites and deployment scripts created during this project so that organizations may build and operate the use case implementations in their own enterprise environments. All of these are packaged by PushToTest and published under a free open-source SOA Knowledge Kit found at http://soakit.pushtotest.com.