LISA Industry Solutions: Insurance Solutions

What is ACORD XML?

ACORD is a global, nonprofit insurance association whose mission is to facilitate the development and use of standards for the insurance, reinsurance and related financial services industries. ACORD has developed two XML standards:

• ACORD XML for Life & Annuity: A family of specifications for the industry designed to enable real-time, cross platform business partner message/information sharing. It accomplishes this by combining the rich data vocabulary of a Life & Annuity Data Model that pre-dates the current popularity of XML with all the benefits of XML.
• ACORD XML for P&C/Surety: Defines P&C/Surety transactions that include both request and response messages for Accounting, Claims, Personal Lines, Commercial Lines, Specialty Lines and Surety transactions.

The artifacts of both standards include:

• Sample WSDL specifications for web services
• XML schema definitions and DTDs for common data objects
• Documentation describing implementation requirements and guidelines

ACORD has wisely utilized the IT industry standards for SOAP messaging, WS-Security, and document based WS-I web services as a baseline for developing their insurance industry specific standards. An insurance company can use the ACORD XML standards while developing their SOA applications, and rest assured that their systems will be compatible with other companies following the same standards.

More information: http://www.acord.org/Standards/lifexml.aspx or http://www.acord.org/Standards/propertyxml.aspx.

Testing a SOA built on ACORD XML standards with LISA

The following cross-industry standards are leveraged by the ACORD XML standards:

• SOAP 1.1: the Simple Object Access Protocol version 1.1.
• SOAP Messages with attachments: a binding for a SOAP 1.1 message to be carried within a MIME multipart/related message
• HTTP 1.1: the Hypertext Transfer Protocol version 1.1.
• SSL/TLS: the Transport Layer Security Protocol, which provides communications privacy over a transport protocol such as HTTP, over the Internet.
• WSS 1.0: Web Services Security: SOAP Message Security 1.0

LISA's web services testing capabilities cover all of these standards. In addition, LISA 4 will provide XML schema and DTD validation, so messages received from the SOA under test can be automatically validated to meet the ACORD XML standards.

The XPath driven XML assertions in LISA 4 will be highly valuable as well. Most of the web service interfaces defined by ACORD XML are document based; meaning the parameters and results are actually XML documents instead of simple primitive arguments. The new XML assertions provide an easy to use GUI interface to make advanced comparisons on XML results.

Any complete SOA application is more than just web services, and an insurance industry SOA application based on ACORD XML standards is no exception. It will also have backend data storage, other middle tier components (potentially EJB, CORBA, legacy systems), and front end user interfaces (HTML, Swing GUI). LISA differentiates itself from the competition dramatically in this space, with its ability to test all of these different interfaces inside one tool, even inside a single test case, entirely GUI driven (no code).