Articles

John Jones--Migrating to an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a bigger decision than many companies realize. It creates the opportunity for central management and access points for all the services available in the enterprise. When determining the need and the method for enabling an ESB for services, there are several important considerations. The ESB can act as a simple access point in terms of acting as a proxy to hosted web services; it can orchestrate calls to many web services through languages like BPEL, and it can also house the web service code itself.

Mike Kavis

Management Strategies for SOA

The SOA consortium has been running an annual contest for the best SOA Case Studies. Last year I attended the event and summarized the common characteristics of successful SOA implementations. This year's winners shared the same characteristics:

By: John Moe
About 15 years ago I came across ‘The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook’ by Jay Conrad Levinson. The concept was to create branding and lead generation through unconventional and small scale activities and events that could have as much impact as a large seven figure advertising campaign. Unfortunately, a lot of people took this as an excuse to commission irritating and humourless “viral” internet campaigns churned out by clueless marketing agencies. However, the concept of getting maximum results from minimum resources has stuck with me.

We’ve come pretty far with SOA. Gartner reports that “SOA” is the most widely used search term on their Website. On Google, a search for “SOA” turns up 6,750,000 matches. And all of us in IT probably have to wade through some discussion related to SOA on a daily basis.

Originally inspired by techniques used to design buildings and cities, and popularized by the Gang of Four during the mainstream emergence of object-orientation, design patterns have seen us through the various shifts in architecture, technology, and, of course, design. Pattern catalogs have periodically emerged, one building on the other, and each revealing a set of problem-solving techniques and providing invaluable insights as to how and when those techniques should be used to help us attain our design goals.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) proposes a model of software as a distributed network of cooperating services, in contrast to the traditional, more monolithic application model. Operationally managing such applications requires a sophisticated management organisation and operating framework that are capable of defining and sustaining service levels to customers across the enterprise.

Have you ever wondered what makes for good SOA style services? Well, wonder no more. Good services must be:

Many organizations out there don't really have to sell SOA. They understand that hype is the driver, and, in essence, leverage the thousands of articles and books on the topic to sell this architectural pattern.

It's hard to think about service-oriented architecture without thinking of services; after all, services are the main focus of SOA (it's even in the name). If service-oriented architecture is an approach where the business and technical architecture is oriented around services, then what exactly is a service? Unfortunately, the answer to this question varies greatly depending on whom you talk to and how you're using SOA in your organization. This variation tends to create quite a bit of confusion when trying to design and implement a SOA-based solution.

Strategies for enterprise data management (EDM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) are often pursued as separate, disparate programs and initiatives within organizations, both as a business requirement as well as an IT implementation perspective. However, there are important overlapping and interdependent components, processes, and quality checkpoints for each in which coordination is necessary to ensure the success of either strategy.

Furthermore, by coordinating these strategies, organizations will realize opportunities to optimize: