- Pick and mix of services for building an ECM solution
- Reimplementation of individual services
- Multiple implementations of a service, where the appropriate implementation is chosen based on the context within which the solution is executed
- A pattern for extending SkyVault (at design and runtime)
- Easier testing of services
To support this approach, SkyVault used the Spring framework for its factory, Dependency Injection, and Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) capabilities. Services are bound together through their interfaces and configured using Spring’s declarative Dependency Injection.
A service interface is defined as a Java interface. For services that form the internal embedded API for extensions, cross-cutting concerns such as transaction demarcation, access control, auditing, logging, and multi-tenancy are plugged in through Spring AOP behind the service interface. This means that service implementations are not polluted with these concerns. It also means the cross-cutting concerns can be configured independently or even switched off across the server if, for example, performance is the top-most requirement and the feature is not necessary.
Multiple services are aggregated into a SkyVault subsystem where a subsystem represents a complete coherent capability of the SkyVault server, such as authentication, transformation, and protocols. As a unit, subsystems have their own lifecycle where they can be shut down and restarted while the SkyVault server is running. This is useful to disable aspects of the server, or reconfigure parts of it, such as how LDAP synchronization is mapped. Each subsystem supports its own administration interface that is accessible through property files or JMX.