Is SOA really dead?

By Nick Hortovanyi

A blog post titled "SOA is Dead; Long Live Services" was directed to me by a couple of persons. It highlights, what I first started to describe a couple of years ago as "Journalist led technology"; sometimes I do believe that it is Analyst led as well. That is, that the potential promise of the technology genres and acronyms, in this case SOA, take over. Without necesarrily having the real world experiences to back it up, to cut through the hype.

We most not forget that SOA means Service Oriented Architecture. It is an architectural style, that is a different style, then what has been used in the past in the client/server world of old. "to SOA or not to SOA" which I wrote about a couple of years ago, is always an interesting question.

"What are the alternates to a SOA style architecture?" still holds true in my opinion, that if you are not using a monolithic 80s/90s style client/server model, then there will be a business tier that exposes services at some granularity to be consumed by a presentation tier or another business tier service. Its the pace layering that becomes the issue (my thoughts here on timeless software).

To me Anne has highlighted the true issue that has been missed which is the important stuff: architecture and services.

Tags soa saas middleware technology analyst cloud journalist business   |  Comments 0

Titles with the term Architect in them

By Nick Hortovanyi

I love putting the term Architect in my title. Normally I describe myself as an IT Architect to people in the IT profession, and even to those outside of IT, as they seem to understand it.

But it is an interesting title as even the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) has a a great debate occurring on "What is Architecture?" . I've been waiting for some time for an update on this.

Over the last while I've found these titles:

• Enterprise Architect
  
• Domain Architect
  
• Information Architect
  
• Solution Architect
• Software Architect
• System Architect

In some discussions that I have had with people, the only consensus that I seem to be able to gleam is that the purpose and responsibilities of the persons fulfilling the roles are different in each organisation. The IT profession in this area, is still evolving as the complexity increases. But in all cases these persons work with areas of abstractions, the granularity and level of that abstraction, is inferred by the prefix of the title.

I in the past had tried to define another being that of a Communications Architect, focused on presentation and collaboration technology.

Have you come across other titles with the term Architect in them? If so what was the title and what was its purpose?

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The "Keeping the Lights on" Mentality

By Nick Hortovanyi

Mike Kavis (aka Mad Greek) has done it again and written an excellent blog entry - The "Keeping the Lights on" Mentality. I see this all too often, in a number of accounts that I visit. IT as a cost center, with the focus on "Keeping the Lights on", not as a driver of innovation in the business. 

I was hoping that I saw signs of movement away from this, last year, when I wrote about Empowering IT to enable innovation. My concerns are that any gains that may have been made, over the last year or so, have just been eroded with the recent events surrounding the credit crunch. However, I view it as potentially an opportunity for some organisations to facilitate innovation that allows them to get ahead of their competitors. I wrote more about this issue in this entry Uncertain times - can SaaS based applications be used to get an edge.

Tags culture mentality lights soa saas innovation   |  Comments 0

Evolution of Composite Service Architecture standards

By Nick Hortovanyi

SOA has evolved from hype to a mature set of standards. Am glad that people's thinking is moving it away from Just a Bunch of Web Services (JBOWS) to a more component services architecture. This from a simplistic view means defining clear interfaces for the tiers as the means of interaction. Bindings may be in multiple languages and through different mechanism (ie JSON, WebServices).

Importantly the standards that are evolving are language independent. All be it, outside of the Microsoft world, significant effort has been placed by the major vendors into the two following standards:

• SCA (Service Component Architecture) - provides a programming model for building applications and systems based on a Service Oriented Architecture; and
• SDO (Service Data Objects) - designed to simplify and unify the way in which applications handle data.

They have essentially evolved from the work of the osoa.org (Open Service Oriented Architecture) organisation. I believe since the initial specifications have been released that the work has now been handed over to OASIS Open CSA - Composite Services Architecture.

SDO has become an important technology, over the last few years, in IBM WebSphere for use with JSF (Java Server Faces). Increasingly SCA will become more dominate in middleware components. So its worth the time to learn more about it and experiment. 

Tags soa sdo java osoa jsf sca opencsa   |  Comments 0

SOA Success Plus Wiki

By Nick Hortovanyi

Recently, we have created a SOA Success Plus wiki. This wiki is open to all, who register, to contribute if they so desire regarding experiences around SOA. Yes, wikis are all the rage at the moment and we are working out how to gain contribution from the larger SOA attentioned community as we go!

I've created a front page of types but am now thinking of creating six major sections being:

1. SOA Architecture Style;
2. Governance for SOA - both business and IT;
3. SOA Tools;
4. SOA Platforms;
5. Knowledge Transfer; and
   
6. Services (well this one is open to interpretation a little ).

Any assistance, suggestions or comments on getting this wiki up would be greatly appreciated.

Tags soa+success+plus soa wiki   |  Comments 0