for J. William Bennett

William Wrigley, Jr. (1861-1932) once said "When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary."  Without experiential deliberation there can be no change. Without change there can be no progress.  Doing something "the way its always been done" or finding no fault in a faulty process, is as common today as it was in Wrigley's day. Not addressing such issues can render your business unnecessary.

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J. William Bennett

During a recent engagement (2005) to assist an international start-up software company in Geneva, Switzerland, I found the product design was under intense pressure to provide greater flexibility and independence.

The product under development was a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) system for public market trade and tariff applications.  It had extremely advanced features and an excellent life cycle road map for continuing feature and function improvement.  However, the market reaction was mixed.  Some potential customers wanted a 'shrink-wrap' type COTS product that had a minimum of integration requirements.  Others wanted only certain functions from the architecture - like the product's well developed Risk Management Engine.  Others wanted bespoke (custom built) solutions based on strict user interface, mobility and integration requirements. 

Short of creating a complicated ERP-type solution, the designs needed to provide solutions to all these types of clients meant several different versions; developing proprietary interfaces and APIs; and supporting several different  implementation paradigms.  This was a costly and risky proposition.  The answer was SOA - Services Oriented Architecture. 

SOA involves the use of Web Services.  In a nut shell, Web Services are modular Internet applications that perform specific, and often very discrete, functions or processes [Senn, 2004].  They are written to conform to a standard technical format.  As such, they can be seamlessly integrated with other Web Services-capable (Web Enabled) applications. Together such Web Enabled modules present a single application system image to the user.

SOA takes Web Services and Web Enabled applications to the next level. In effect, making them "Enterprise Enabled" and even "Globally Enabled".  There are three basic components to SOA: the Service Oriented Architecture Protocol (SOAP) - previously known as Simple Object Access Protocol; The Web Services Description Language (WSDL); and the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) service. 

• SOAP is the protocol used by an SOA application to invoke a web service on another computer.  SOAP containers are simply an extension of XML.  As a matter of fact, a simple SOA between known applications needs only a SOAP construct to function as an SOA application. 

• WSDL is another layer of XML description that identifies the specific capabilities of a globally available web service.  It also defines the internal protocols, parameter and data formats the service uses.

• UDDI is basically a phone book.  If you need a service at home you often turn to the yellow pages to find services listed by type, location, name, category, etc..  UDDI provides this same type of service for WSDL enabled applications.  UDDI can be enterprise centric or a  worldwide Internet service.

After several in-depth meetings and a series of Use Case workshops to determine what functions or processes needed to be 'exposed' as Web Services, the COTS product vendor presented its new architecture to potential clients.  The acceptance was overwhelmingly in favor of the new architecture.

My first exposure to XML and Web Services as an SOA tool was during my contract development with a small software company in 2001 (see Job Descriptions and Development, SMA).

There are few really knowledgeable SOA practitioners.  It is just now entering the academic areas of Information Technology study.  Most technicians, engineers and developers learn SOA through integration tools such as WebLogic^(tm) where SOAP containers and WSDL layers are generated automatically. 

Many global standards setters (BEA, IBM, HP, Dell, SAP, SUN. Microsoft, Cargill, Bearingpoint, Accenture, Deloitt,...) support the SOA standards.  For this reason it is the fastest growing and enjoys the widest support of any emerging technology standard.  SOA is the new business process management (BPM) enabler.  It is also the direction taken for most current Enterprise Architecture Integration (EAI) solution providers and ASPs (application service providers).

References:

Information Technology, Principles, Practices, Opportunities, Third Edition, Jams A Senn, 2004, [Senn, 2004], Pearson Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River NJ

Service-Oriented Architecture, BEA Developer Dev2dev, Retrieved from: http://dev2dev.bea.com/soa/index.csp, April, 2005.

EA Initiative, SOA Patterns, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Retrieved from: http://enterprisearchitecture.nih.gov/patterm_soa.htm, April, 2005

Characteristics of Service-Oriented Architecture, Mark Cohen, IBM, Retrieved from: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soaintro.html, April, 2005

Service-Oriented Architecture, .NET Compliance, Microsoft Corp: http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/soa/default.aspx, March, 2005.

Further Reading on SOA:

Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures: http://www.service-architecture.com/

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services: The Road to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI): http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/WebServices/soa/  

What is Service-Oriented Architecture? - by Hao He, 2003: http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/09/30/soa.html, March 2005

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