Is SOA dead within the enterprise ?

It is often said that SOA is dead simply because it does not appear to have been adopted in any great way by many enterprises but nothing could be further from the truth.

We need to consider here that enterprises change very very slowly for good reasons. They have systems running for many years that have served them very well. Many have learned through painful experience that making quick changes can costs millions in lost business and productivity through systems working slowly or not being available.

The point is that 2, 3 or even 5 years in the IT cycle of an enterprise is not a huge amount of time. Many will IPL (reboot to readers unfamiliar with this term) their enterprise systems (normally large mainframes) only once or twice a year which may surprise many people who see Windows and Linux as being the be all and end all of computing and a regular reboot as being a fact of life. Many enterprises have adopted a SOA approach over the years already so SOA is really just a new term for what they have been doing before it was called SOA.

Many enterprises have been using services for many years and will continue to align these with the external services provided via the Web and other new channels over time and more than likely even when someone has come up with some new term for it. The SOA Gateway is a simple way of introducing a SOA structure into your enterprise.

What is a standards based SOA ?

In the early days of SOA discussions, many people would have understood the term SOA to relate to implementing services using the following standards amongst others:

-         TCP/IP and HTTP to provide the connectivity to the machine(s) where the services reside.

-         eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to provide a platform, technology and language neutral way to exchange messages.

-         Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) which enables a service to describe in XML what it can do and how to call it. This is the piece that enables software to understand what a service can do and how to call it without any software installation being required on the client system accessing the service.

-         Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) which is used to build the request message (based on what was learned from the WSDL) to issue a request to a service and to receive a response from a service.

Using the above standards, technologies like MS InfoPath and many other technologies that understand these standards can:

-         Connect to another computer and request the WSDL for a service using TCP/IP and HTTP.

-         Receive and parse the WSDL (written in XML) to determine what methods the service offers.

-         Build a SOAP request to invoke the service and to understand the SOAP response from the service.

While SOA has come to mean different things to different organizations depending on what they are trying to sell, using the above standards and other related standards will ensure your services can be used again and again by multiple technologies on multiple different platforms and represents the ‘standards based SOA’ mentioned in the title. The SOA Gateway enables the creation of standards based services using configuration and without any coding whatsoever.

When is a SOA implementation complete ?

This is a question that is raised many times as it is quite normal to want to draw a line under any effort when it has been completed.

SOA at its highest level is architecture and an organization wide philosophy of how things will be done drawing input from the business and IT parts of an organization. Unless your organization intends to stay static for the foreseeable future, the SOA Implementation is an ongoing effort as each new project emerges.

During the early stages of the implementation of a SOA in your organization, there will be many projects planned and ongoing as you move forward to improve what is currently there. Many SOA projects will be completed as you proceed but in the early stages at least, there will always be further projects to complete.

As SOA becomes embedded in the organization, the numbers of projects will potentially be reduced, however, in a vibrant organization, things are continually changing and new projects will always be on the cards. These too must be implemented to work within your new SOA.

Ultimately while individual SOA projects will be completed, the effort to implement SOA in your organization must continue forever and will continue to provide benefits as your organization progresses.The SOA Gateway can form a key part of any SOA strategy.