SOA-101: The best 25 minutes you’ll spend learning about SOA
For a wonderfully concise and lucid synopsis on what you really need to be aiming for while devising an SOA, watch Jim Webber’s InfoQ interview.
He discusses the Agile-hugging benefits of an emergent service ecosystem, provides best practices around building for scalability, highlights what makes RPC (even if you pronounce it “doc/literate”) bad in terms of technical abstractions like types and operations, espouses the simplicity of message-oriented interactions, summarises the features of SSDL (a simpler alternative to WSDL, WS-CDL and WS-BPEL), and touches on the “degenerative” RPC model that is unfortunately being adopted by implementations claiming to be RESTful.
For links to those mentioned in Jim’s interview:
- Savas Parastatidis, the greek geek grid god (PS: Savas, can you confirm my Greek phrase, two posts down?)
- Various SSDL contributors from academia, most of whom have moved on but easily Googled
- Patric Fornasier, SOYA creator and newly joined to ThoughtWorks (woohoo!)
- Mark Baker, the Bob Marley of RESTifarians
…and you’re already at me.
For the Aussies, Halvard Skogsrud and I are presenting a workshop at the October 2008 Ark conference on SOA (Achieving Interoperability in Systems Architecture), which I’m also chairing. Our workshop is entitled “Bearing the standards of interoperability” and, amongst other things, includes some more depth on Jim’s comments around tight coupling, REST, MEST, and “tunneling XML”. There’s some great presentations on the card from credible people, all of whom have real-world experience in forming SOA’s within the corporates and government they are employed by. You can download the conference brochure here. I look forward to seeing you!
Josh
I like the bit about credible people speaking at the Ark Conference. If I make a mess of it does that make me incredible?
I enjoyed Jim Webber’s interview and it intrigues me how we can get even looser coupling with MEST.
Antony
Comment by Antony Kimber — August 30, 2007 @ 10:59 pm
Incremental SOA is the only practical, cost-effective way to implement SOA. The complexities and costs assoicated with traditional, ‘top down’ architectural implementations do not appeal to today’s business desring agility through SOA. Most IT organizations have been ‘burned’ too many times with ‘boil the ocean’ IT projects which lose sight of their business objects quickly and become ‘a quest’ in and of themselves. Incremental SOA does not mean no sound architecture. it means breaking implementation down into smaller, incremental implementations that ‘plug and play’ into a larger implementation. Such a methodology is infinately scalable, and far less complex to manage.
Comment by John Senor — September 1, 2007 @ 1:49 am