SOA
There are 58 entries for the tag SOA
Cloud computing is the buzzword of the moment . It seems that applying the "cloud" label is a real desire for a lot of people out there in the marketplace. This of course leads to the arguments about whether the "cloud" label is appropriate or just marketing spin. Why on earth is Cloud Computing so appealing? I think there are a lot of factors. I'll outline a few of the main ones below … Trendy To a certain extent delivering a cloud solution suggests that organisations are on the cutting edge of...
There really has never been a better time to get into Enterprise Architecture as the global economic downturn means that smart companies will be looking at making efficiency savings through strategic implementations and process streamlining, identification of function duplication and better IT/business alignment. Enterprise Architecture is a hard thing to get off the ground so why try and re-invent the wheel and benefit from the experiences of others in many different organisations. Using a framework...
The Open Group has recently released a draft version of a SOA ontology. The Open Group has always had a mandate to help boundaryless information flow and the ontology (specification of conceptualisation) for SOA is a demonstration of just that. The ontology is written in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) defined by the World-Wide Web Consortium and this for me is what makes it a hurdle to learn as it's not an intuitive meta-language but then is any? Perhaps if it wasn't for the graphical tools we would...
Vmware currently is going through the wars. A change of CEO, a plunging share-price and a competitor getting alot of attention with their new product, that being Microsoft with Hyper-V. However, I just don't get it!? ESX Enterprise is still out in front in terms of features and pricing is very competitive. Any organisation performing their own unbiased product comparison evaluations is going to be hard pushed to discount Vmware's flagship product. The killer feature for many is ofcourse Vmotion that...
Many of us did it, made one New Year Resolutions to many at the Millennium and didn’t managed to succeed in any of them. I tried to give up smoking, losing a bit of weight, drinking less beer, save up to buy a house and learning to drive. A lot of change there, to much infact, so unsurprisingly I failed. A common story. 8 years later, all those things on the list are (more or less) achieved and how I did that was by concentrating on fixing one thing at a time. Again unsurprisingly, psychologists...
Analysts, vendors and end users alike appear united in their enthusiasm for SOA. Recently the Butler Group tells us that only 3% of organisations have rejected SOA. In a recent survey by systems integrator Griffiths Waite found that 2008 is a critical year for SOA implementation, with 15% of organisations already running SOA but a much larger 38% progressing towards it. Of the 47% still “contemplating” it, Giffiths Waite says “evidence suggests these will [start to] move into strategising and planning”....
Recently, I was involved in a SOA review for an organisation (obviously, I do not wish to name names) It was pretty clear that they hadn’t actually adhered to many of the key SOA Design Principles that are, Standardized Service Contracts Service Loose Coupling Service Abstraction Service Reusability Service Autonomy Service Statelessness Service Discoverability Service Composability Service-Orientation and Interoperability Much of the SOA was built using a single vendors technologies many corners...
If you are still writing code using .Net 2.0, why? WCF rocks! I don't usually get excited about development technologies but this one I do! WCF really does save time and large amounts of connectivity code and makes a big difference in SOA projects, this I discovered awhile ago when WCF was code-named Indigo. From a SOA perspective, the most important reason to use .Net 3.5 is the ability to use WF and WCF together. Before hand it wasn't really possible so an upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 is well...
Jeff Schneider over at Momentumsi has stirred up some EA’s with his post Why Enterprise Architecture is a Joke in particular John McGovern with this post which Jeff Schneider replied to with this. In Jeff's post, point 3 hit home the most ... "3. Silo Organizations promote Silo Funding. Many EA's never had a chance. They live in organizations that fund everything according to business silo's. Then, the EA is expected to bridge the silos with nickle and dime funding. Their inability to perform Herculean...
Selling the theory for SOA is pretty easy, the execution is harder because technically it isn't actually a very simple thing to do, let alone the changing of the structure of your IT organisation to house-keep. The book SOA Approach to Integration is aimed fairly and squarely at the Architect and Senior Developer who has the job of designing and implementing SOA technical level. The book is very resolute in keeping a strong focus on the technology and pleasantly realises that successful integration...
Oslo is the codename for technical thinking aimed specifically at simplifying designing, building, managing and scaling of service-oriented and composite applications that can span from the enterprise to the Internet. It is thought the first version of Oslo will be delivered through the next versions of our application platform products such as Microsoft Visual Studio 10, Microsoft System Center 5, BizTalk Server 6, BizTalk Services 1 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4. So, we are talking a 18 months...
Rich Seeley recently interviewed John Michelsen, chief scientist at iTKO Inc who said ... "the service-oriented architecture (SOA) testing and governance provider, believes developers do not have to chose between Web-oriented architecture (WOA) based on a simple Representational State Transfer (REST) approach and SOA following the WS-* standards. "It's not an either/or question," he says in the following interview from Integration World 2007 this week in Orlando, Florida. However, he does argue that...
The place to be in Tech on the 1st April 2008 will be the Royal Albert Hall, London, UK for the Technology of Tomorrow 2008 Seminar. The speakers announced already is a formidable list of who's who in Tech, Sir Richard Branson Carly Fiorina Steve Wozniak Jimmy Wales Ben Verwaayen John Swainson Alfred Chuang Peter Guber Harpal Kumar The event is specifically aimed at decision makers in IT and is not free, tickets start at £611 and can be purchased from here. I don't think this is to much to ask to...
Zapthink's recent article on Who's Killing SOA? hit the nail on the head to the reasons why SOA is not succeeding! However, reading the article I think that Zapthink has missed the two main reasons why SOA is currently not succeeding. 1) Education - I believe that people in Business & IT are not completely clued up on what SOA is in enough detail to implement it. 2) United Vision - People in Business and IT do not have a united vision of what SOA is and do not have a complete enough understanding...
The post is a cautionary tail of the latest episode of common sense versus cool. AJAX is a great technology that allows webpages to have much richer content. Google Maps was the turning point for this technology as it brought the technology to the attention of the Technorati that has enjoyed a superficial level of hype ever since because it is encompassed as the lynch-pin of Web 2.0. The key part of AJAX is Javascript which is a language that all mainstream browsers, no matter what operating system,...
I have been watching the channel 9 video on Biztalk.Net Services. I have to say I’m pretty excited about this project and the reason why will become apparent later on in this post. BizTalk.NET Services ( http://labs.biztalk.net ) is an experimental project (it’s at CTP currently) that extends WCF and is all about generic, secure connectivity. It’s a free download so fill your boots! The project has come about from the result of customer feedback where many have asked “how do I notify client applications...
This is pretty shocking and I will let the introduction on the article speak for itself. "Despite being positioned by vendors at standards for service-oriented architecture, Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Java Business Integration (JBI) will have little or nothing to add to SOA development, argues Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. In this Q&A, he explains the ZapThink view that SCA and JBI are mostly about vendor politics and hype and can pretty much be ignored by architects...
What makes me quite annoyed is grand statements such as the title to this post. It is true that REST is getting more exposure these days and it being primarily a connectivity technology i.e. a web service it's not unlikely that SOA and REST will inevitable get linked together. The Burton group has stuck it's neck out and said that yes REST is the future of SOA. Funnily enough today at work I was talking with some colleagues about REST and one raised a good point, where are the working examples? So...
No I haven't been in hiding but as the proverb says 'there is no rest for the wicked', so I must have been very bad. Anyway, I have a new house which has meant tarting up the old one and work has been ultra hectic but our websites for a well known travel brand are going live one at a time. Anyway, I hoping from a nice summer to get stuck into some good tech. Microsoft has also been busy, it is becoming crystal clears days where Redmond is heading with Service Oriented Architecture. For example John...
One of the key parts of a SOA’s is the Business Process Logic Layer. One of the key technologies in this layer is Windows Workflow Foundation, one the key things that was missing from WF was support for BPEL so this called into question Microsoft commitment to the XML standard. Anyway, I’m happy to report that BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March CTP is available able from MSDN Download. With this add-on you will be able to import and export BPEL from WF. Remember it is still in CTP so is officially...
Is EDA or Event Driven Architecture set to supercede SOA ? Well John Bates, VP of Apama Products and researcher at Cambridge University has stuck his neck out and said yes in a recent interview with SearchWebServices Rich Seeley. Ok, so what is EDA firstly ? Well Wikipedia definition says, " Event Driven Architecture (EDA) is a software architecture pattern promoting the production, detection, consumption of and reaction to events. An event can be defined as "a significant change in state"[1]. For...
This coming Wednesday (March 7th) Benjamin Mitchell who is one of the founders of DDD, will visit us at Oxford NxtGenUG to give us the 101 on the Windows Workflow Foundation and a few demos on how to quickly building workflow enabled applications. Now if you're like me who has a suspicion that 'Dub' F is going to useful but don't have the time to investigate it fully then this is the perfect opportunity to find out ... and eat pizza, meet fellow coders and a change to win swaaaaggggg! I just want...
For sometime now I have been working on a few papers on the subject of SOA. This is the first, my definitive definition of what is SOA Governance. 'SOA Governance' is perhaps the hotest of topics in the SOA world currently but it seems that almost everyone with an opinion has a different definition of what it is and how to do it. I have attempted with this post to distill these definitions into one document which you can take away and use as part of a policy statement to help you with your SOA's...
I haven't blogged for a few weeks and there are perfectly good reasons for that, Firstly, I've been playing with all the new technologies such as WF, WCF, Office 2007 and Vista. Vista was fun getting it to work on my Toshiba P100 laptop, but thanks to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com I have a fully functioning Nvidia 7600 Go graphics card and Aero is running just sweet and DirectX games are just fine (infact I think they run quicker!) However these are not officially supported drivers so use them at...
UPDATE : Now Microsoft have fixed this issue I pointed out from the orginal post, you will now be safely redirected to http://www.microsoft.com/bi... ... nice one Microsoft and thanks for listening! http://www.ibm.com/soahttp:... http://www.sun.com/soa http://www.oracle.com/soaand now try ... http://www.microsoft.com/soa Not even a redirect! ... A big trick missed here. This is just another demonstration of how the product teams and tech guys are building...
Bless Grady Booch! Love him or hate him you can't keep him down! Just only a few weeks after open heart surgery he has posted another classic! This time Grady has decided to take a few pot-shots at SOA picking fairly and squarely on the hype. Well to be honest Grady, IBM doesn't actually get away scott-free when it comes to SOA marketing hype, the 'middleware' campaign over the summer springs to mind. Anyway, I for once pretty much agree with him on this one, infact I touched on this a few months...
All, This is a fantastic paper from ARM Research that sums-up the current state of play in the SOA market with IBM and Microsoft here. I am constantly frustrated why Microsoft doesn't shout from the roof-tops that it has a compelling SOA solutions. I believe Microsoft infact has the most complete end-to-end tool-set for SOA. The article states that the reason is "Microsoft believes that eventual backlash to all the hype around SOA shifts focus away from the real benefits that SOA can bring, so it...
At this moment in time I am really getting into the challenges of our SOA implementation. It is clear that we are not going to be able to achieve all we would like to in this phase of the project as there are more important things to get done in the times scales. The Data Search Façade One of the elements of the project is that two important pieces of data reside in multiple systems. What the existing legacy application does is to search each of these system in turn until it finds a match, then...
Back to Earth after my Channel 9 video. In this post I want to discuss some of my recent experiences implementing SOA. It’s important to take everyone with you. SOA is a Sea-Change in the way programs are developed and implemented in an organisation. The concept of an ‘Application’ is very much redefined. It’s so important that the reason why are communicated not only to key stake-holder in business, but everyone in the I.T department, specially those that are at the coal...
I’ve been catching up on my news since coming back from holidays and I found this little gem. Microsoft has made a rather low-key statement which it has entitling the OSP or Open Specification Promise, basically what the statement says is that Microsoft will not pursue you for legal recompense for patent infringement for many of their core web services technologies. This for me and anyone involved in the SOA world is a big deal. This is fantastic news for SOA as it basically means that Microsoft...
Over the last few weeks I’ve been on leave enjoying a much deserved rest if I do say so myself. This year the wife and I decided to not get on a plane and head for foreign climbs purely because neither of us fancied facing the new airport security restrictions and the weather here has been amazingly good so why not have a holiday at home in the UK? I ask you, where is the fun in not being able to take 100 weight of books, booze, food and that cool gadget you’ve just brought from Dixon...
It is a logical, reasonable and best practice stance to examine getting the most out of assets that are already at your disposal especially if there is an emphasis of reduce costs which is one of the driving factors for selecting SOA in the first place. With SOA one of the most emotive technical issues to tackle is where to host the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) as there is an attraction to examining hosting the ESB on existing hardware, a mainframe would seem an obvious choice. In this post I will...
In this post I will be taking a high level look at what a possible SOA implementation architecture scenario and what it might look like giving an indication of what technologies are involved. This example scenario is a SOA implementation for call-centres using Microsoft Technologies, some you may have heard of, and others that are sadly as yet unsung. A few things to note, I haven’t come across a medium to large organisation that doesn’t use Citrix for the UI deployment so this is why...
In the next two posts we are going to discuss SOA which as you may know if you read this blog regularly is a pet subject of mine. I’ve encounter many a good person that is fully aware of SOA and its much hyped benefits but this doesn’t help them visualise it, hence these posts which are for you good people. The logical model is my interpretation of SOA, it may not be everyone’s interpretation, so if it’s not I would love to hear from you. The SOA logical model has 6 layers, Existing Systems, Data...
I don’t usually like to be blunt as a general rules these days as you can imagine that a whack over the head can often offend but in the case of SOA 2.0 I’m willing to let this rule slide. Oracle and Gartner are starting to talk about a term called SOA 2.0. In a nutshell SOA 2.0 is SOA + EDA or Event Driven Architecture. The natural progression of service is towards an event driven model but this does not necessarily mean that this is an upgrade to SOA. EDA can happily fit inside SOA...
Microsoft has, with very little fan-fare, launched another site specifically aimed at Architects called www.skyscrapr.net. The differences being it is aimed specifically at Solution, Infrastructure, Strategic & Industry Architects which to be fair aren't areas that Microsoft has covered much before. The site has afew articles, blogs and links to podcasts with a novel new feature called the 'Archipedia' is to provide plain english definitions of architectural topics such as for example 'What is...
... was the conclusion of a recent IDC Research survey, entitled 'FROM PILOT TO PAYOFF: SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE HITS ITS STRIDE' which can be found here.Top Survey Insights• Between 2005 and 2006, SOA adoption accelerated – with increases in pilot program, departmental, and enterprise-wide deployments.• SOA spending increased, while funding for traditional architectures dropped.• SOA momentum will continue to build, as most companies consider SOA a critical short- and...
Someone (they didn't leave a name) recently suggested I should stay off the coffee before I start talking about SOA, hence the picture (thanks consumerist.com for the use of), fellow GWB'er Chris Williams also suggested I should get things off my chest, so here goes. I’m sick of SOA and the state of affairs it’s in now. SOA is suffering from a very major credibility issue that threatens to kill off the term and therefore I fear the ideal. Ironically, the cause of the problem is the very...
In this day and age keeping up with that is going on is an art in itself. Yes, there is blogs, articles, webcasts, on-line teaching, podcasts and vlogs, all pretty cool if you really have the time but nothing beats someone examining it to you in person. This is why DDD days are great! So, I’ve been thinking for sometime now what would be a good DDD session? Well one of the elements of my role is explaining to people of all areas of my business the benefits of a particular technology or technological...
When companies such as BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Siebel Systems, IONA and Sybase comes together it is for an important reason. There are two main reasons for this, firstly Enterprise Java Beans initially didn’t come up with the goods, it didn’t really do the job it was advertised to do and it was clunky and clumsy. Secondly, because J2EE wasn’t as good as hoped it endured a few major revisions which has made it difficult (and expensive) to get JCP certified. Ok, so there is...
IBM, I’m totally and utterly baffled by WebSphere! There are so many products under the WebSphere banner, (I lost count at around 200) also it’s not really clear what pieces of the puzzle fit together in the suite. So, let say I want to integrate two disparate applications, what product under the WebSphere banner do I use? Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite? WebSphere Information Integrator? WebSphere Integration Developer? WebSphere Translation Server for Multiplatforms? WebSphere...
IBM have followed Microsoft's lead and created a section dedicated to Architecture on their DeveloperWorks site which can be found here. The resources has a lot of content already but it all seems to be around the architectural subjects that IBM want to push such as SOA and model driven development, instead of a broader range of content aimed at all the disciplines that Architecture covers but I'm sure this will grow with time. Anyway, if you are an Architect it is certainly worth signing up to the...
What were you doing on Saturday? Traipsing around the shops looking for new socks? Spending hours in the Supermarket? Getting the car sorted out? That badly need haircut perhaps? It’s sometimes a bit of a rubbish day-off. But last Saturday it was another fantastic Developer Day 2 @ Microsoft in Reading followed by a Geek Dinner! Ahh my Geek Heart almost exploded with excitement. Now I didn’t go there for the freebies! Who does that? Please! I did however go to socialise which is one of...
Tata Consultancy Services (or TCS) are setting up a new research in emerging technologies such Grid, SOA and Collaborative Software Development. Their press announcement can be found here. I have the good fortune to work with TCS on projects within my organisation. Have no doubt that the Indian consultancies are here and are fully aware and equipped to take on today’s and tomorrows challenges. They have passion and the correct attitude. Yes it is true that not all of their developers have made...
IBM is concentrating very hard on SOA right with links right from the http://www.ibm.com front-page, which is more than Microsoft. They are investing $1 billion a year into SOA based technologies. They also claim to have over 1000 "SOA customer engagements all over the world". Now to earth with a bump, did IBM spend a lot of money on development of SOA or marketing because this website has been over done by marketing and really has very little content, there is nothing new here that I can't find...
And now to my other project that is close to my heart at the moment which is SOA. As you may recall, we were having difficulty in selling the idea of SOA in our business, this has now changed. We have a project and a business sponsor. So in this post I want to reflect on some of the tips I’ve picked up so far that I would like to share with you. Now this is list isn’t completely comprehensive, I’m bound to have miss something out, but hey, something to talk about in future posts....
I’ve been pretty busy recently with two of my projects, mobility and SOA, getting to critical stages, the first project mobility I will talk about here in this post and the second in the following. So my mobility project has finally made it to POC (Prooth Of Concept), which means that a small-ish test group of actually user are using hand-held devices as part of their primary function. As yet I’m not at liability to say what the mobility project entails in great detail but I promise I...
Apparently IBM is going to make a big announcement on SOA this week so keep your eyes peeled for that … I will keep you posted of course
Right, we all 'get-it' that we should be moving to using web service and SOA (well you could've got the hint by now if you've been reading this blog for any length of time), but taking the first step is difficult, so where do you start? All the SOA articles on ‘how-to start’ advise that you should begin with the contact … and I’m not disagreeing. Thinktecture are developing a great new free utility for .Net that will allow you to do just that and can be found here. Enjoy...
In this post we will introduce the concept of SOA anti-patterns. Like any architecture there is a right and a wrong way to do it. SOA is no exception. Silo ServicesService Orientation is more than just a distributed technology it is a decentralised technology. Enterprises are complex and in terms of IT are not often controllable from a central point, much less through a single technical architecture. As such the tendency for business units to develop services in line with local demands should be...
Over the next few days I will be posting a series of my notes as I finish typing them up on some of the day’s sessions at the Microsoft Architect Forum in London, Mayfair. I will not be covering every session in detail as there just was so much, I found it hard to take it all in, being mortal and all. Anyway down to business ... The first session of the Architect Forum was Connected Systems Strategy by Anthony Saxby, Practice Manager and CTO at Microsoft, a man I have had the pleasure of meeting...
Thanks to Ian for the original post on Channel 9. Training is very important and these free courses from Microsoft are a God send. The one that has really caught my eye is, Course 2925: Building Managed Code for SQL Server 2005 and Creating SOA Apps with Visual Studio 2005. Now I’m wading my way through it as we speak! Now being a free course you don’t expect them to be all that good, well this one is and before you ask the question, yes I would pay for it if it wasn’t free. These...
The next big event in my tech calendar is the quarterly UK Architect Forum. This time the event will be held at the Cavendish Conference Centre. You may be too late to register, but here is the link. My organisation is no different from any other large organisation in having integration issues. So I am fighting for us to take the first tentative steps into SOA so of course I am more than a little intrigued by one of the main topics and I quote. “How to do SOA SOA has been around for a while...
Have you built a mobile solution for you company from scratch? Yes, I’ve tried it too. Don’t get me wrong Visual Studio is a very powerful tool and the emulators are a great step forward but for my mind most of the pieces of the solution just aren’t there and you have to end up building most of that yourself. The risk is the components parts are not built to best practice and often aren’t as productive as they could be. In this space you are still very much on your own. Often...
Lets talk more about SOA ... I have been reading allot on SOA recently whilst I've been getting my thoughts more in order since previous posts that have been admittedly hap-hazard. Rather a lot of pundits on blogs or in the media have pondered numerous questions and made many predictions, I’ve even read a lot on Geeks with Blogs! Will 2005 be the year for service oriented architecture (SOA)? What is this technology? Is it new? Has it really been around for along time? Will SOA be most talked...
Right, let’s talk more about SOA. Many people have different visions of what SOA is, mine is actually very simple. Don Box’s 4 tenets. Tenet 1: Boundaries Are Explicit. Services interact through explicit message-passing behind the boundaries. We make no assumptions on the space behind the service boundaries. Crossing service boundaries can be costly (for example, you may need to span geography, trust boundaries, or execution environments). We explicitly opt in to service invocation, by...
I'm a firm believer in SOA and for the life of me I just don't understand why people are so negitive about SOA. Yes it has enjoyed a lot of hype, but in my opinion not without warrant, but the industry is full of hype, it's one of the factors that makes the I.T. industry what it is. But surely when I.T. companies all start singing the same tune, doesn't the penny start to drop? No even the people who are abit 'slower than others' must be getting the message by now? SOA isn't a cure for cancer, it...
Greetings Earth Men (and women ... will be PC on the blog, thanx muchly) ! I come in peace, with woow so many years of experience under my belt I should have retired or been shot by now! Welcome to the first instalment of my 'Happy Space' as Mr Robert Scoble (President elect of the Blogworld) but unlike Microsoft Marketing department you'll get the chance to answer back disagree and just plain old talk to me. This space will be all about my passions the things that make me go wooow and I hope that...