EOA Specification

The EOA specification defines the structure and behavior of an EOA system which provides a standards based platform for the development, testing, deployment and management of your e-commerce and application integration projects. Alakai is the first EOA system implementation. The EOA specification builds upon the 'service oriented' approach to systems design while addressing its shortcomings. The primary distinction being that the EOA approach is engine focused as opposed to being service focused. This distinction will be better understood once you've familiarized yourself with the underlying component model.

The EOA Specification, which is manifested as an API of abstract classes and interfaces, can be thought of as the "middleware" API. Unless you are developing EOA extensions, e.g. bindings, engines, features, etc ..., you as an alakai user, will probably never need to reference this API. You will instead be working primarily with the "application" API's. Please see the spring application example which helps demonstrate this difference. Nevertheless, it may be helpful to develop a general understanding of the underlying concepts which define the overall structure and behavior of an EOA system.

The EOA specification promotes a component based framework which builds upon the WSDL 2.0 component model (with some tweaks to make it backwards compatible with WSDL 1.1). If you are familiar with WSDL, the EOA component model should be immediately intuitive.

The EOA specification API is divided into two separate libraries. The core specification library, which should be more or less static once the final version is released, and a library which contains extensions to the core specification, which will be released more often. The javadoc for each can be found here:

It should also be noted that, based upon its acceptance within the community, it is our intent to transfer the specification to an independent 'standards body,' e.g. the W3C, once it has been sufficiently incubated.