"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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August 31, 2008

Making Your SOA Journey Successful – Key Aspects

Adoption of SOA is growing faster and faster. But whenever an organisation adopts new approach/framework/technologies, mistakes are likely, and SOA is no exception to this rule. I have been personally involved in quite a few big SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) initiatives. Keeping the trend of mistakes, organisations and I have experienced those and tried to rectify those in the subsequent ones and thus those become part of the best practice. Even though organisation starts with a big dream of SOA with Strategy, Roadmap, Value add to business etc etc, there are number of key important best practices to be followed which have been experienced by the industry, are above and beyond just having SOA Strategy and Roadmap at the beginning. So, it's very important that the experience of the early adopters of SOA is captured for the benefit of those who are planning to adopt SOA in the near future. Identification and documentation of all those processes / policies / technology / best practices that is most essential - will help enterprises avoid mistakes and successfully implement SOA. I have captured few of the processes / best practices which must be in place for adopting SOA in an enterprise.

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Posted by Shubhankar Sumar at 01:34 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 19, 2008

Will Next generation XML Appliances propel XML and SOA into the Enterprise Mainstream?

Intel has released some new numbers, as they noted in comments to an earlier blog entry. These are some highlights:

 Decryption, Application of XACML policies, routing to different SOAP services: 1050 messages of 7.64 KB processed per second

 Legacy to SOA Integration use case: 980 messages per second for a healthcare HL7 format messages

Mediation use case: 5184 messages per second, including validation, transformation, SOAP message generation. 

What additional windows of opportunity do XML  appliances of  such speed open up?


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Posted by Kevin Apte at 02:47 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Story of the main-stream SOA

I’m calling it a story since it is yet to happen…more ambitious word for this will be ‘vision’.  But given that ‘SOA’ and ‘vision’ have been beaten to death in last couple of years so let me continue with the story only. Key word in the title really is not the ‘story’ though..it is the ‘main-stream’ and soon you will see why. One of things in SOA that make me sick is the ‘real-ness’ of it (or rather lack of it). I personally feel that SOA as a concept is running out of steam to remain in the ‘hot seat’. There isn’t much new or different coming out from it than what has been spoken about thousands time already in difference styles and with different jargons. For that matter, I think ERP as a concept has done far better where in journey from speculative vision to physical realization (what so ever it has been, that really doesn’t matter) has been rather fast and it did change the shape of the industry to large extent. With SOA, industry seem to going on and on and on but like everything else, SOA will run out of the fuel sooner or later. If industry doesn’t something new in SOA which is the next level of life with SOA, it will not sustain. Skeptics are already ignoring it, even believers might drop the ball after a while. So what do we envision beyond this?

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Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 04:42 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

August 12, 2008

Top 10 ways to Fake your way to the SOA-XML bandwagon

As a SOA Architect, I certainly do not approve this. But here are the top 10 ways you can "Fake your way to the SOA-XML bandwagon. "

In some companies SOA has been oversold, or may be premature. For example, Security and Fine Grained Entitlements are  so critical in some financial institutions, that without this piece in place, it may be premature to talk about SOA. Or may be the data still exists in silos, making it impossible to construct meaningful useful services, that address the immediate business needs of the organization.

But  if you are under pressure to be supportive of SOA and XML, here are some ways.  

 

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Posted by Kevin Apte at 09:02 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

August 10, 2008

Gaps in the IBM SOA Security Reference Architecture - Part III

Is it necessary to have an advanced and  mature SOA Stack in order to have centralized security policy creation and enforcement?  If a SOA Stack is not at a stage where Composite Applications are proliferating, is centralized security still required?

You need centralized security policy creation and enforcementet quite early in your SOA program. The first step in your SOA initiative will be to decide what level of granularity your services should be at. It is very easy to create webservices using built-in wizards found in many IDEs as well as wizards offered in products like databases and portals.

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Posted by Kevin Apte at 09:14 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 08, 2008

Gaps in the IBM SOA Security Reference Architecture - Part II

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Why do we need different Architectural Building Blocks to specifically address SOA Security?  Should the best practice of “Independent Chain of Command” be part of SOA Reference Architecture?

These are some of the questions and comments, I have been asked in response to the first part of this series.  SOA Security must handle the highly composite nature of today’s and emerging SOA Applications, and this ability to handle composite, frequently changing, dynamic applications is a critical requirement for managing security in SOA environment.  

Maintaining Security Accountability in the context of   composite applications that cut across IT business unit, Enterprise Application, databases is a key challenge for SOA Security.

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Posted by Kevin Apte at 05:28 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 04, 2008

Gaps in the IBM SOA Security Reference Architecture- Part I

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Recently,in the context of a client request, I had a chance to look at the IBM SOA Security Reference Architecture, described in this redbook. I found some critical gaps in the reference Architecture. I will highlight these gaps in this and subsequent blogs. The first gap is that the SOA Security Reference Architecture, does not consider supporting an Independent Chain of Command for managing Security Policy. The second gap is that it does not explore the use of right architectural building blocks to enable externalization of Security policies outside of applications, portals, databases, data services, service components and; Business Processes, The third gap is that it does not recommend the right set of tools with which enterprise grade SOA Security, based on the the two principles mentioned above can be implemented. With these gaps in place, demonstrating and maintaining compliance with regulations and laws will be difficult. In this blog, I will describe the concept of Independent Chain of Command in detail, I will describe the other gaps in the next two entries.

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Posted by Kevin Apte at 09:52 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

July 15, 2008

Turbocharge your SOA Infrastructure with XML Appliances- Part III ( Some numbers from Intel )

In the last 2 blog posts, I talked about use of XML Appliances to turbocharge your SOA infrastructure. In this blog, I intend to provide some numbers provided by Intel. Most other vendors do not seem to have these numbers in a public document.  The features described here are available from many different vendors, and the other products in the space are equally good, with comparable performance numbers.

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Posted by Kevin Apte at 06:39 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

June 28, 2008

TurboCharge your SOA Infrastructure with XML Appliances-Part II

In this and subsequent blogs, I  plan to discuss the advanced features of XML Appliances: Field Level Fine Grained Security, Rule Based XML validation, XML to HTML transformation, XML to WML transformation and XML to XML transformation.  In this  and subsequent blog entries, I will discuss only Fine Grain entitlements, and discuss other aspects in a subsequent blog entry. 

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Posted by Kevin Apte at 06:10 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 23, 2008

Service Oriented Elephant?

SOA applicability is very dependent on an organization's environment. Recently I got into a discussion about "SOA in the small." Is it feasible? I think not. But IMHO elements of SOA can be applied to the organization to fit into an enterprise SOA roadmap

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Posted by Ajit Sagar at 02:52 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 07, 2008

Turbocharge your SOA infrastructure with XML appliances-Part I

As SOA initiatives mature, the number and size of XML messages starts growing rapidly. The total XML traffic can therefore  grow exponentially. Elegant architectural design principles, such as canonical models, and model driven architecture,  require processing large XML payloads. Assuring good performance at reasonable cost, while maintaining SLAs can become challenging.  XML Appliances address this issue, and are maturing into a hardware/appliance based replacement for ESB.

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Posted by Kevin Apte at 10:30 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

June 03, 2008

Service Oriented SOWs

Around the budgeting cycle at establshed clients, the three dreaded words "Statement of Work" loom around the corner. Why dreaded? Well, getting all the ducks in a row, tailoring the effort, resources, and cost to the ever-changing environment of the corporate world is always a big challenge. Interestingly, the basic principles of SOA can be readily applied to the preparation and publication of SOWs.

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Posted by Ajit Sagar at 02:40 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 28, 2008

SOA-enablement of spreadsheets - is it feasible?

SOA transformation is all very fine, but does is apply to all situations? For example, how do you apply SOA principles to organizations where the multitude of desktop users love the spreadsheet interface and swear by it? Perhaps a better question is, how should you apply SOA principles to environments where users are not looking to share information between desktops, where the ultimate flexibility of your own personal spreadsheet is inherently the differentiator between your product and your competition's, and where SOA is looked on as "Simply Over Ambitious?"

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Posted by Ajit Sagar at 11:46 PM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)