SOA Future

SOA: The Past

It is often asked as to why haven’t people been using SOA for the last twenty years? As far as SOA is concerned, in order to build a system out of parts, you require a standard method of representing software parts. If no such standard exists, then building such a system can become incredibly difficult.

Though Service Oriented Architecture is not exactly a new thing, Businesses have spent the last fifteen years trying to come up with a set standard. While CORBA and DCOM have been in existence for a while, they never became worldwide standards.

Internet has set up standards in more than one way viz., HTTP and HTML, which link together people all over the globe. Businesses witnessing the growth and the development of the Internet decided to use similar strategies to link their own computer systems together.

Such Businesses first came up with Web services standards which were based on technologies that originated on the Internet and made use of technologies such as XML and HTTP as a means for representing software parts and linking together a number of different computer systems.

There has been an adoption of web services as the standards to base Service Oriented Architecture. Software vendors such as webMethods have brought out a variety of products onto the market that have made Service Oriented Architecture quite useful.

SOA: The Future

In recent years there have been meaningful debate on what standards Service Oriented Architecture should be based upon in order to optimize functionality in future scenarios.

Researchers have found that there is an obvious pattern to first time Service Oriented Architecture implementations. Applications that are currently being used by an organization will be wrapped up and then plugged into a service bus. Then, perhaps a registry will be added as a means of enabling service discovery.

There may very well be instrumentation for the monitoring of performance. Generally all these functions perfectly, but there has not been much of a change made to the underlying enterprise architecture – it is now being expressed using a different language, that of Service Oriented Architecture.

The main organizational value of Service Oriented Architecture lays in its deliverance of enterprise agility. A Business should not try to change this aspect of the architecture. The main corporate Business of Service Oriented Architecture lies in the fact that its service reconfiguration is flexible. Changes can be completed in a period of a few days by business people, whereas before it took weeks for changes to be made by specialists in the field of technology. Yet this also infers that technical and business architectures have to be aligned.

In today’s world, however, this tends not to be the case in the vast majority of businesses. It is not enough to express existing application architecture in terms of Service Oriented Architecture. The services themselves have to be oriented towards Business if you expect Business people to orchestrate them.

First time usage of Service Oriented Architecture tends to highlight the need for semantic interoperability. While Service Oriented Architecture might provide the framework for the integration of cross business operations with information flow in real time as required by developments in the modern day oil industry, there is also a major semantic interoperability conflict that is not being addressed directly by the Service Oriented Architecture. Thus, the usage of information repositories has been the inevitable result.

It must be said that the vast majority of implementers of Service Oriented Architecture are still in the first, wrapping stage. It would be great if we were in a period when legacy applications have been integrated. It is hoped that within the next couple of years, applications will be able to communicate with web services in a native fashion, and will also be able to deliver industry specific functionality in a native fashion.

Such a new breed of services would be very different from the monoliths that are typically used in today’s business environment. Granular business functions will be delivered. They will fit perfectly in to the fabric of Service Oriented Architecture standards in a way that can be orchestrated by business-oriented individuals as a means of delivering enterprise wide agility.