UI Mediator Design Patten

This blog post is an introduction to the UI Mediator SOA design pattern designed by [Utschig, Maier, Trops, Normann, Winterberg] and described in the book "SOA Patterns" by Thomas Erl. The book is a great read and I recommend it to any SOA implementor.

One of the main design goals of a Service Oriented Architecture is to promote flexibility and de-coupling of systems and applications via services. This often comes in the form of asynchronous messaging at the cost of super-fast performance. We choose a message-oriented middleware because it provides flexibility, but often times these messages are asynchronous and aren't guaranteed to return timely responses. The problem manifests itself in the form of a UI that is constantly waiting for a message response. That's where the UI Mediator pattern saves us.

The UI Mediator pattern solves this problem by placing a new "mediator" service between the caller and the service endpoint that does two things:

1. Invokes the destination service we need to consume
2. Returns status updates to the UI

Conceptually, the UI Mediator pattern looks like this. The Mediator Service returns updates to the caller while the background services are processing the request.




More often than not, it's acceptable to let the user continue working in another area of the application while a large operation is being processed. We don't want to block the user from working while we wait for a message response, but we need to notify them of progress and alert them when the process has completed successfully (or potentially returned an error at some point in the processing). The UI Mediator pattern does just that and it's a useful implementation when the use case allows background processing, but requires progress updates to the caller.