Excellent blog about overdoing SOA here. http://www.topxml.com/rbnews/BizTalk-EAI/re-35722_SOA-Adoption--Think-Big-Start-Slow-Scale-Fast.aspx
I couldn't agree more. I have been in situations where the designers race to implement as many ws-* standards and ESB just because it is cool and even if the integration is need is really point to point in internal applications on homogenous platform and customer ends up bearing the costs for time spent on redundant effort.
BizTalk server was taunted as Microsoft's Web Service Enablement platform but I see more and more solutions where the designers feel the need to introduce web services layer on the applications being connected using BizTalk. In my opinion, BizTalk server should be used to connect applications through their native API.. If you already spent the money on BizTalk, I would like to see getting messages in and out of BizTalk with minimum fuss and use BizTalk server's excellend capabilities for dynamic transformation and routing along with BizTalk servers' web service publishing capability to web enable these applications via BizTalk
In fact if each application you are connecting is already web service enabled, you get into rapidly diminishing returns on your BizTalk investment unless you need BizTalk for correlation or business rules. In fact if you enable web services on each of the connected applications then WCF used with channels and routing makes BizTalk messaging and content based routing redundant.
Hello,
I am a Biztalk and Sharepoint consultant and architect. This is my soap box for raves and rants about Biztalk and Sharepoint.