Introducing Service Entities using MongoDB

In this presentation I will present Service Entities using MongoDB as a novel concept to implement persistent Domain Objects that are normally backed by a Object/Relational Domain model. In typical business applications a relational database is used to store persistent business entities. Usually, an Object Domain model is constructed on top of the relational database, resulting in a relational/object mapping. In a Service Oriented Architecture, to finally represent the business entity in an end-user application an object is serialized to e.g. XML or JSON to be represented as UI-Components. We present a novel approach, based on Service Entities, that does not need all the different "mapping" steps:

Each Service Entity is stored in a MongoDB store as first-class citizens.
A Service Layer directly manipulates entities in a Service Language that does not need any mapping-code.
A Service-aware UI layer directly represents these entities using arbitrary UI-components.
The schema-less approach of MongoDB is both leveraged as well as augmented with a schema-full approach using a Service Entity Definition.

Arjen Schoneveld is the cofounder of Dexels, a software company with its roots strongly positioned in agile software development. Arjen holds an MSc and a PhD in computer science from the University of Amsterdam. He is specialized in software architecture, database design, web based applications, service oriented architecture, parallel and distributed computing, parallel computing and simulation with focus on dynamic load-balancing, discrete- event and -time based simulations, heuristic optimization methods like Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing, discrete event simulation and discrete time simulation (cellular automata models). Arjen is also CTO of Sportlink, an initiative that started innocently enough almost a decade ago has developed into a fully fledged large scale Sports ERP system using a pure service oriented middleware layer supporting a multitude of different end user- and third party applications. The Sportlink system is used by all major Sports Associations in the Netherlands.