Monday, September 27, 2010

Avoid Work Station maintenance with SOA

Many years ago when dumb terminals were the order of the day, upgrading those terminals meant changing a fuse or simply replacing them all together. They have by and large been replaced by a PC on every desk which has enabled unparalleled access to applications by users in all forms of organization.


With progress there are always pain points which only became evident as work stations were rolled out across organizations. One of the main pain points with work stations all over an organization is the requirement to upgrade software on each and every work station when specific server software must be updated. This can range from a few hundred PCs to many thousands and results in thousands of person days to keep such software up to date.


Consider then a solution which avoids the need to upgrade software on every PC when server software is updated. Imagine a situation where the software is installed on the server and the work stations just start using the new server software out of the box. Doesn’t this sound like a very attractive scenario ?


Well the wait is over as SOA standards like SOAP and REST mean that this can happen today. When a server communicates using the SOAP or REST standards, there is no requirement to install a work station specific component. This is achieved because the work station software either knows how to call a REST based service already or can learn how to call a SOAP service by exchanging a few messages with the server.


This has the potential to revolutionise how often you need to upgrade the work stations in your organization. The SOA Gateway will enable you to create services on your server systems that require no software footprint on your workstations.

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