"We didn't start the fire ... it was always burning since the world's been turning ..." [Billy Joel 1989]. Is SOA the "Same Old Architecture?" or is it "Simply Over Ambitious?" Let's apply SOA's arsenal:: XML, BPM, Services, SOAP, Web Services - to the real world and find out. Let's put out some fires.

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July 07, 2008

SOA Reference Model & Reference Architecture – The Link

As IT is always full of jargons, SOA is no exception.  One of the most commonly used terminology in SOA world is the term ‘Reference Architecture’. However, there are several places where people seem to mix-up the term ‘Reference Architecture’ with ‘Reference Model’ which puzzled me initially to a large extent. Since then I have been trying to understand the fundamental difference between these two and trying to address the following questions that kept coming up in my mind –
-          Are they same?
-          What is the relationship between the two
-          Do  they co-exist
-          How does one define them and what are the different characteristics

 

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

June 04, 2008

SCA Java EE Integration Spec brings the Java world closer to SCA

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.

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

October 09, 2007

SCA compared with WSDL

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.).

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

January 31, 2007

The new mantra in SOA Management

'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. 

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

January 18, 2007

SOA terminologies - defined !

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. 

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

January 16, 2007

Yet another attempt to define services!

SOA means different to different people as it can be applied in various degrees. This leads to various definitions or understandings among different communities like some listed by searchWebservice, webopedia. Various terminologies like service, service orientation, reusability of services, processes, registry, repository, service data objects, enterprise service bus, enterprise information integration, composite applications etc have made their way into SOA discussions.

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Posted by Naveen Kulkarni at 07:59 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

October 20, 2006

Snake Oil-oriented Architecture - Warning from Grady Booch

Snake Oil-oriented Architecture -- Grady Booch warns readers that modern-day snake-oil salespeople can make it hard to see the fundamental technical benefits as well as the costs and trade-offs of service-oriented architecture (SOA).

 

 

 

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

October 17, 2006

Research Dimensions of SOA - Part4

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.

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

October 03, 2006

Research Dimensions of SOA - pt3

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..

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

September 24, 2006

Research Dimensions of SOA - pt 2

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..

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

September 19, 2006

Is there a research dimension in SOA?

1 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:

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

Value dimensions of SOA explained

Explaining the value dimensions and examining the measurable sub-dimensions.

 

 

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

August 29, 2006

Are standards the answer to Event driven SOA?

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?

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

August 16, 2006

Hype seems to be over, reality sinking in...!!

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.

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