Where's the SOA Beef?
Mahesh H. Dodani · The Journal of Object Technology · 2004
RECAP "SOA is hot now because it reflects a concerted effort to have a full end-to-end architecture that works within and between enterprises." -Bob Sutor, Blog on SOA and web services http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?blog=384Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) seems to be on everyone "lips" and "minds."There is a lot of ongoing work in the area, and the field continues to mature at a very fast pace.Most of the industry is focused on showing the rapid adoption of SOA within enterprises as is evidenced by the following sampling:• Technology analysts are reporting on the state-of-the-practice, highlighting emerging practices, principles, adoption maturity and product support.For example, Zapthink provides many levels of reports covering SOA practice ranging from patterns ensuring adoption of SOA principles to antipatterns showing common practitioner mistakes (http://www.zapthink.com/ cluster.html?id=practice.)• Comprehensive roadmaps for enterprises to adopt SOA are being developed, for example, the one defined by CBDI at http://roadmap.cbdiforum.com/.This roadmap provides an organization a step-by-step guide to transition into SOA and web services.An important aspect of the roadmap is the definition of a maturity model (for the underlying web services technologies) that allows the organization to gauge the effectiveness of their adoption of SOA and the underlying technologies.• Many books have been written on SOA and the practices of adopting it within a solution or enterprise. One such book list, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ tg/listmania/list-browse/-/1MZETAUOOCQS0/ref=cm_lm_lists/002-5289932- 2690458, includes a wide range of books on the topic including underlying components and technologies (e.g.Enterprise Service Bus), patterns and approaches for realizing SOA within enterprises, and tackling Qualities of Service (QoS.)So, "where's the beef" in SOA practices?In order to have a comprehensive practice established, we need to have methods to guide the practitioner, reference architectures