Service Data Objects and business objects define the data flowing between components that are defined in Service Component Architecture.
Part of the IBM® WebSphere® Application Server capabilities that are built into WebSphere ESB, SDOs provide a framework for data application development that simplifies the J2EE data programming model.
WebSphere ESB includes business objects, which are enhanced SDOs, based on the data-access technology. SDOs provide a universal means of describing disparate data (for example, JDBC ResultSet and XML Schema described data). Business objects include some extensions that are important for integration solutions and are used to further describe the data that is being exchanged between Service Component Architecture services. Business objects are part of the Service-oriented architecture (SOA) core of WebSphere ESB.
A business object is a set of attributes that represent a business entity (such as Employee), an action on the data (such as a create or update operation), and instructions for processing the data. Components of the integration application use business objects to exchange information and trigger actions. Business objects are flexible because they can represent many kinds of data. For example, in addition to supporting the data canonicalization model of traditional integration servers, they also can represent data returned from a synchronous EJB Session Bean facade or a synchronous business process, and then they can be bound to IBM WebSphere Portal portlets and JSF components.
Business objects are the primary mechanism for representing business entities, or documenting literal message definitions, enabling everything from a simple basic object with scalar properties to a large, complex hierarchy or graph of objects.
A business object definition is the name, set of ordered attributes, properties, version number, and application-specific text that specify a type of business object. A business graph definition is the wrapper added around a simple business object or a hierarchy of business objects to provide additional capabilities, such as carrying change summary and event summary information related to the business objects in the business graph. A business object metadata definition is the metadata that can be added to business object definitions to enhance their value when running on WebSphere ESB. This metadata is added to the business object’s XML schema definition as well known xs:annotation and xs:appinfo elements. Business object services are a set of capabilities provided on top of the basic capabilities provided by Service Data Objects. Examples are services such as create, copy, equality, and serialization.
For more information about WebSphere Application Server Service Data Objects, see the .WebSphere Application Server documentation