What is Petals Platform?

Petals Platform is a middleware solution, composed of following open source software:

• Petals ESB, an enterprise service bus and the core of the platform, provided with many standards components for communication/data integration () and data transformation.
• Petals Studio, an IDE based on Eclipse, with wizards, interface and code validation all dedicated to Petals ESB environment.
• Petals View, a business monitoring software.
• Petals Master, a governance software to make the most of your services architecture.

The combined capabilities of these tools make Petals Platform a complete solution for seamless applications and services integration.

It is mainly developed by EBM Websourcing, aka Petals Link.

What is Petals Platform used for?

Modern enterprise needs

As a extensible platform revolving around an open source Enterprise Service Bus, Petals Platform can cover traditional needs as well as more ambitious projects. Most companies / organisations have three typical needs nowaday:

• application integration: connecting heterogeneous applications to share data or features, automate some processes, in overall lessening the human intervention in data processing.
• mediation platform: exposing data and/or services outside one's infrastructure, to allow employees to work in travelling, providing online services to clients or partners, to gather data from external sources...
• flexible infrastructure: being able to adapt services, processes or modifying software composition (like, replacing a business-oriented solution for a more performant one) without impacting the running infrastructure.

The two first needs are being covered for years, with the help of EAI (Enterprise Applications Integrations) solutions, ancestors of today's Enterprise Service Buses.

As for the need for an agile infrastructure, that's where [Services-Oriented Architectures] shine, and that's why SOA market soared up since the last years, while SOA as a concept gained analyst's approval. [FIXME mettre sources]

However, setting up a services-oriented architecture from an existing infrastructure can be very time&money consuming. This is where Petals Platform play its cards. Thanks to its native conception and configuration / administration / business-oriented tools, Petals Platform allows a pragmatic approach for SOA integration.

SOA integration, a pragmatic approach

A typical SOA project using Petals Platform could be as such:

Phase 1: Building a small-range project to integrate Petals ESB in your infrastructure, and learn its use.

1. Draw the "map" of your infrastructure, so you can see where you start from. (Chief Information Officer)
2. Define a simple case in which you could use Petals ESB (interconnect two applications, expose a service through a webportal, chain several applications's features as services to create a business process. (SOA Architect / Project Manager)
3. Deploy Petals ESB and necessary components with the Petals Webconsole. (Developer)
4. Create necessary services, thanks to Petals Studio. (Developer)
5. If necessary, orchestrate the services to create a business process. (???)
6. If planned, expose the resulting process. (???)
7. Set up notifications on desired exchanges (Developer)
8. Configure Petals View to monitor and retrieve desired information for further exploitation (Business Analyst)
   With this, a specific part of the infrastructure has been made flexible, interoperable, SOA-ready.
9. Deploy Petals Master, to set the bases for a good SOA-oriented management: build services index, create companies/users/roles, associate these data to related services.

With this, you have set up a fully functional environment with SOA capabilities, while keeping complexity and resources consumption to a low level, thanks to limited field of implementation.

Phase 2: Once the container is installed, and you gained design/configuration knowledge, you can expand your SOA integration on a step-by-step basis, depending on needs and resources.

1. Define another use-case, in same or another business department.
2. Check the Petals Master's database to find any reusable service.
3. Deploy new components if necessary.
4. Build services and orchestrate them.
5. Set up messages notifications
6. Configure related monitoring in Petals View
7. Update Petals Master with new users/company/roles and services association.

Petals Platform Features in a nutshell

Distributed

Light & Powerful

Standard & Open Source

Ease of configuration

Ease of administration

Business-oriented monitoring

Business-oriented management

[See detailed Petals Platform Features list]