I know what you're thinking: SOA hype has reached an absurd level and now
someone is literally proclaiming that it will change the world - but bear
with me for a minute. Anyone who has been around corporate IT for the last
five years or so has seen an avalanche of development work sent offshore for
two primary reasons: cheaper unit labor cost and the flat-out inability to
find qualified American developers. Also, the mainstay system development
model whereby business units built up app silos, which served to minimize
reuse and increase integration complexity, demanded a way to deal with the
cost of its own inefficiency.
Offshoring was perfect - you could justify using twice as many developers as
necessary when they cost one third as much. The trend hasn't been just
limited to corporate IT either. Offshore workers are handling many other
business functions, though t... (more)
Testing is a first-order constituent of SOA governance. Assuring that
services and service infrastructure components meet functional and technical
requirements across lifecycle stages and environments, including production,
is an architectural precept in SOA.
Gone are the days when testing was an isolated hop in the old disjointed
SDLC. You know the one I'm talking about - an architect would design a
component, hand it to developers to develop and they would hand it to testers
to test, and testers, in turn, who would hand it to system administrators to
operate. The components we... (more)
I'm sure I'm like many of you in this respect: I got into engineering because
I love the idea of being able to address complex problems with a combination
of my talent, my friends' talent, and the tools that I can come up with to
make our work as easy as possible (work smart not hard!). It is this approach
that has guided me in my work as an application and technical architect. I
come to work every day looking for that "wow" feeling that comes when I
realize that another problem that seemed intractable has been solved. But in
the pantheon of hard problems that beset projects I wo... (more)
Sometimes when we're faced with addressing a complex engineering problem it's
helpful to reflect on antipatterns. Doing so does more than track wrong
solutions to common problems; it also focuses the mind on the interaction of
the most important elements of the problem domain. This is true for all
engineering, not just software engineering. Suspension bridge designers know
to be on the lookout for torsional oscillations because of the collapse of
the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but they also better understand the importance of
stiffening the structure in general. The goal is to limit ... (more)
Many enterprises are currently reorganizing their people, processes, and
technology around services. A few are holistically revamping their enterprise
architectures around SOA and embarking on roadmaps to achieve grandiose
business goals.
Far more enterprises are trying to deal with the unexpected emergence of
services and service integration requirements resulting from platform
upgrades, portal mashups, ESBs, and service-oriented business requirements
such as external partner federation. No matter how they come to SOA,
enterprises quickly realize that they need to manage and go... (more)
Paul O'Connor is SOA Practice Director and Chief SOA Architect for e-brilliance LLC (a leading NE SOA consultancy), and is currently doing major SOA architecture and implementations for Fortune 100 clients across the US. Previously he was chief architect for Damascus Road Systems, specializing in security architecture.
David Lucas
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
