Service-Oriented Architecture

by Murteza Salemi, Shubhankar Sumar 

Coming up with service categories seems at first an easy task but when you start thinking about it and discuss it with other architects, you will be dazzled on how many different definitions exist out there. It is not a matter of which one is right and which one is wrong but how we are going to agree on one set of definitions and terminology so we can talk with each other and using the same words (terminology) without having different meaning (unambiguous) for them.

Continue reading "Service Category – The world of Confusion" »

Posted by Shubhankar Sumar at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

by Goutam Mukherjee

REST has made huge inroads into the Services space in last few years. It has become a very popular style to define how the Service Interfaces are designed and how the Services are accessed. Since SOA is also all about "Services", it is obvious that there will be an inclination to draw some correlation between REST and SOA and rightfully so. Sometimes that does open doors for some confusion and you start asking questions like “Am I not implementing SOA if I adopt REST style?” or “Does REST have inherent support for SOA?” or “Is REST the next level to attain after SOA” or even “Has SOA given way for REST?” and so on. So it does make sense to try to understand these two concepts and try to correlate the two.

Continue reading "REST and SOA – the compatible duo" »

Posted by Shubhankar Sumar at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "The giant standard bodies say it again “SOA is not about technology but rather about the big “A” in SOA; i.e., Architecture”" »

Posted by Shubhankar Sumar at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Do you have enough buy-in from Business, IT and other key stakeholders and of course the right business case to adopt SOA?

Continue reading " Ready for the SOA Journey: Check Your SOA Maturity" »

Posted by Shubhankar Sumar at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "SOA Reference Model & Reference Architecture – The Link" »

Posted by Shubhankar Sumar at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The SCA Java EE Integration Specification has been released. It is quite an interesting read. The vision of SCA is to build composites and composite applications out of configurable, reusable service components or assets as I had tried to explain earlier. It does not intend to replace existing open standards but to build over those standards to enable a technology agnostic service component integration platform. So it has support for multiple communication protocols (or binding types), component implementation languages (implementation types) and component interface languages (interface types). The list of these types is growing. Also I had mentioned (SCDL vs WSDL) the promise to support so many technologies in a standard manner is indeed a big one! This often gives rise to skepticism in some quarters and comparison with similar looking standards such as the JBI.

Continue reading "SCA Java EE Integration Spec brings the Java world closer to SCA" »

Posted by Sudeep Mallick at 03:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

What is that SCA does which WSDL couldn’t already do! ?

Well, on the face of it, it may look quite an answerable question but its implications go deeper on second thoughts and perhaps makes one think deeper about the future of SCA and perhaps make educated guesses about it. Here, I will try to answer this question and one need not know anything about SCA (except that it is a superseding component specification model which promises the heaven – no plumbing code only business logic, remember!).  I will assume you have fair understanding of WSDL. SCA promises to be an interesting component specification on the horizon and backed by big names such as IBM, SAP, etc. so no harm spending some time understanding it. Seems like it is logical evolution from the J2EE component specification and some basic ADL concepts – component, interface and connectors…In fact most of the concepts are familiar in the Java world (references, annotations, etc.).

Continue reading "SCA compared with WSDL" »

Posted by Sudeep Mallick at 04:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

'SOA has created unexpected complexity' what caught my attention and reading through the article I hit upon another unexpected term -

‘The Ovum survey found a high correlation between a business' level of satisfaction with SOA and their commitment to managing IT as a set of services.’

Surprised! services being tagged with IT, services being abstracted to such a large extent (as my thoughts were channelized only on to SOA)... I continued reading and among examples was what I found - ITIL.  So it was about ITIL, a framework and set of best practices to be followed for IT management and operations. 

Continue reading "The new mantra in SOA Management" »

Posted by Naveen Kulkarni at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The intended grand vision of a universal service broker though has fallen down; the need for cataloging service is however being more and more realized as critical pieces in solving the puzzle of realizing SOA. Till early last year there had been various products offering service-cataloging features based on UDDI standards.  But now we see another terminology being thrown across called repository. 

Continue reading "SOA terminologies - defined !" »

Posted by Naveen Kulkarni at 04:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Binooj Purayath at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

While SOA has been advocated as the automation mantra for application to application interaction (including integration, collaboration), Web 2.0 is being promoted as the new trend in rich client computing with rich computation power on the front end platforms.

Is there a relation between Web 2.0 and SOA? We explore in this track of research

Read on.

Continue reading "Research Dimensions of SOA - Part4" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 06:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yet another research dimension of SOA.

While SOA abstracts IT functionality on basis of standards, these standards base themselves on XML as the core representation format. The dependence upon XML imposes performance constraints due its verbosity, and need for parsing.

How can we do research to overcome the performance challenge of XML in SOA? Read on..

Continue reading "Research Dimensions of SOA - pt3" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In continuation of past post on research directions in SOA, one key issue that often bogs the enterprise integration architects is the balance between realistic integration solutions and hyped approaches like the next IT wave.

In that context, events are a natural language for EAI practitioners to understand. Read on..

Continue reading "Research Dimensions of SOA - pt 2" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Quite often IT waves which trigger a huge hype initially, followed by a more realistic expectation setting among practitioners, the real gaps needing deeper research and insights, come to the fore.

At this moment, SOA is slowly moving from hype to reality. In this transition, apppear like a pandora's box the enormous challenges which can aid practitioners adopt SOA realistically and practically.

At Infosys SETLabs, we are constantly working on research directions to help practitioners adopt SOA with a realistic and practical approach.

To list these areas:

Continue reading "Is there a research dimension in SOA?" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Value dimensions of SOA explained" »

Posted by Dr. Jai Ganesh at 03:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recent trends in EAI practices indicate the coming of mainstream of event driven architectures.

However, the complementary trend of SOA is still to recognize the value of events and event driven architectures for generating scaleable SOAs. Event driven SOAs are occupying the mindshare of a lot of SOA practitioners, and vendors like TIBCO etc.

However the catalyst to coming of event driven SOA might be in form of standards?

Continue reading "Are standards the answer to Event driven SOA?" »

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni at 07:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

SOA is not just about software architecture or technology 

A recent survey by Ovum of 333 U.S. IT decision makers has formally announced what was obvious all this while. One in five surveyed have said that moving to SOA has created unexpected complexities.

To me, the root cause seems not to be with SOA itself but with not expecting the complexities that come with its uncontrolled adoption. There are hundreds of definitions for SOA, the tricky part is that each one of these is correct in its own context. For example, product companies are promoting a more product centric definition of SOA, which will help them sell their products. However, most of these definitions miss out on the big picture. Its like "six blind men and the elephant". What is essentially missed out is that SOA is not a technology but a concept, that its an enterprise software architectural style, its a "disruptive" way of organizing and managing business with support from agile software services.

Continue reading "Hype seems to be over, reality sinking in...!!" »

Posted by Shireesh Jayashetty at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)