January 7, 2008 9:07 PM
Posted by: Dilipkrishnan
SOA
December 31, 2007 9:48 PM
Posted by: Dilipkrishnan
SOARecently I ran into this post from Arnon of DDJ fame which is in response to another response by Sam Gentile 
. I wrote about this in related posts a while back and this seems to be a recurring theme in many discussions. Seems like both are trying to say the same thing that “SOA is all about the business”. but I can’t help but add my 2 cents to this discussion
This (SOA) has nothing to do with business drivers. It has to do with defining components, relations, attributes on relations and components as well as constraints.
By the way, SOA has nothing to do with technology either. You can implement SOA using WS-*, Atompub, MSMQ, CORBA just as much as you can implement REST with quite a few technologies.
Putting those two statements together means SOA has nothing to do with technology nor business!!!
On a serious note tho’, its my opinion that the “relations, attributes on relations and components and constraints” are all business level components, relations between them, attributes on relations and components and constraints. SOA is a way of thinking about (read architecting) your applications and how they interact with and compose with each other to provide business value. How this SOA is “applied” has nothing to with the business… well yes it does, but not in a direct way.
To take an analogy of building a house. The notion that the house needs to have a certain set of properties like good ventilation, good sun light, access to different rooms etc is akin to what an SOA lays a blue print for. Now which wood/ paint/ nails etc to use to build (read appling SOA); i.e. achieve that vision is only material to the builder (read solution architect/developer) not the home owner (read business stake holder). The home owner only cares about the “business” constraints/attributes. I’d say SOA s all about the business!
December 31, 2007 8:54 PM
Posted by: Dilipkrishnan
Development,
SOA,
Web servicesMany internet-years ago Microsoft released an experimental service in the cloud called BizTalk Connectivity Services. Pretty neat stuff. It consists of the following pieces… (to quote the description on the site.)
- Identity Services are hosted services that enable organizations to more easily manage their users and help developers create more secure applications that support user identities from many different organizations.
- Connectivity Services are hosted services that make application messaging between organizations easier.
The identity services are pretty basic at the moment and allow just enough fine grained control over resources. It has the notion of
- Resources – which act as boundaries/scope of controlling access
- Operations – which give a finer grain of control, as to who gets to do ‘what’ within the scope of a resource. Operations represent the logical actions that are allowed within the resource
- Rules – which tie users/groups to operations
The connectivity services are just fantastic. The SDK thats ship with the service makes connectivity such a simple task.
This year has seen the mushrooming of many cloud-services not to mention the number of web 2.0 applications that expose their APIs for external consumption. There’s a bunch of very interesting services available in the cloud today and its my guess (oh well, prediction! ) that in 2008 these cloud based services will capture the mindshare of folks (of folksonomy fame), helping them create applications that will connect people/applications using the internet as a service bus. We’ll try and explore some of these cloud services in the following weeks
December 31, 2007 5:00 PM
Posted by: Dilipkrishnan
SOA
December 27, 2007 8:04 PM
Posted by: Dilipkrishnan
SOATechnorati Profile
December 24, 2007 8:27 PM
Posted by: Dilipkrishnan
Development
December 20, 2007 9:44 PM
Posted by: Dilipkrishnan
SOACame across a very interesting (and as always, a very insightful Jon Udell) conversation about syndication-oriented architecture. Not, to deemphasize the benefits of the “information flow within the enterprise” via syndication; but, its really an amazing observation that “The line us blurring between personal information management and publishing“; and recent developments in the syndication space might just be the right technology to see that happen.
James Snell from IBM has an interesting comment on the FeedSync service
“For search engine indexing, we assume that the search engine indexer is acting just like the first offline client example above. For the most part, all the search engine will be interested in are significant changes to content and the tombstones so that deleted content can be removed from the index.”
This might really change the way web sites open up their content for search and make content more relevant and accurate, more specifically, tying it back to information flow in the enterprise, it will make enterprise search that more efficient. Good stuff!
Feedsync makes rss/atom syndication two way and I’d like to call this Active Syndication!
December 16, 2007 5:03 AM
Posted by: Dilipkrishnan
SOALike I opined in an earlier post; it cannot be stressed enought that web-services is only an technology enabler not a panacea to all the worlds business problems!
In a recent article in http://www.itbusinessedge.com titled “One Technology Does Not Fit All SOAs”
This may not be easy to do – you may need to hire additional help, either by finding a consultant or creating a staff enterprise architecture position, if you don’t have one.
In November, I asked Linthicum how companies can find qualified SOA consultants. He suggested you find a qualified architect who can guide your SOA implementation.
Now what role is such a person supposed to play? In most cases, its someone who suggests appropriate strategies/solutions that are best of breed, capable of solving the existing problem domain.
In reality, companies invest a lot of money in technology choices they make; either going J2EE route or the .net route for the most part. more than likely a that its a “solution architect” thats hired to fit the business initiatives within the confines of the existing technology investments or within the expectations of technology investments in the future.
Can these be the same person? I think an enterprise architect would not suggest anything different from whats mentioned earlier in the same article, and wouldn’t be wrong in doing so!
Donald Rippert outlined four phases of implementing service-oriented architecture:
- Using XML as an interface.
- Making legacy systems available as Web services.
- Using an ESB (enterprise service bus) to connect Web services and use composite processes.
- Using BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), which he notes will make it possible to change a business application by changing the process model rather than the code.
Its the “solutions architect”, responsible for each application that needs to integrate, who needs to map the proposed technology direction to the most effective implementation within his respective business domain. At the end of the day its all a matter of opinion but SOA will only succeed if its a middle-out SOA with grass roots adoption.
December 16, 2007 4:05 AM
Posted by: Dilipkrishnan
Development,
SOA,
Web servicesYes its that time of the year and these posts make sure you dont forget!!
