UnitSpace allows businesses to shift from the procedural approach that focuses on syntax, structures and specific code to a declarative approach that emphasizes semantics, models and metadata. This becomes possible through the addition of a new IT infrastructure component, which hosts Web services that can be created and managed by non-programmers. Ability to create and manage the lifecycle of Web services uniquely distinguishes this UnitSpace product from other types of middleware, which focus on linking existing service providers and consumers. Web services created in this way differ from custom-coded Web services in several important respects:

1. They are metadata-driven, so they can be adapted on-the-fly by IT managers to align to changing information models and processes.
2. They are standardized, leveraging pre-built implementations and promoting coherent interfaces.
3. They are identity-aware (secured) to serve data only to the users who are authorized to retrieve it.
4. They are instrumented for manageability and can be managed using built-in comprehensive administrative tools or using outside systems management software.
5. They foster reuse by leveraging metadata, which is easier to reuse than code.

Fig. 1. Declarative Approach Advantage

UnitSpace BCR Server is an integrated end-to-end service delivery platform that combines the capabilities of Web services management, producer, provider and consumer platforms with a SOA-native data store. Featuring a declarative approach to service composition and change management, these capabilities enable enterprise architects to design and implement interoperability-centric SOA solutions in a fundamentally new way. By applying standards-based reusable metadata instead of custom program code to create and update their services, organizations can save time and money while focusing more closely on their business imperatives.

Advanced features:

• seamless UDDI and BPEL integration
• flexible service views with attribute-level granularity
• on-the-fly entity extraction
• side-by-side service versioning
• multi-format (many-to-many) data transformation

Overview: The Problem  Manageability