Information Renaissance – Service Oriented Architecture
The Information Age. That is what many pundits, writers, and analysts have already labeled these concluding years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This characterization of our time is based on the emerging information and communication technologies .These technologies provide means to overcome the barriers imposed on communications by time, distance, and location and the limits and constraints inherent in human capacities to process information and make decisions.
The dawn of twenty first century also marks the beginning of the Connected Age, which is the age of the web workers. Today’s version of the web is of special importance because people, hardware, software and information are all inter related forming a hyper connected network.
In this article I would like to talk about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style where existing or new functionalities can be grouped into atomic (independent) services. These services communicate with each other by transferring data from one service to another or by working in coordination.
Web services can be used to implement service oriented architecture. The focus is on making web services into functional blocks that can accessible over standard Internet Protocols independent of platforms and programming languages.
A new survey, reported here, finds that most executives see SOA as a key enabler to effective use of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches.
The survey of 330 companies in 11 European countries, sponsored by BEA, found that 55% view SOA as “the best way to support the use of social networking and Web 2.0 development techniques in their IT infrastructure.”
The survey was followed by an explanation on how exactly these companies see SOA and Web 2.0 converging, other than pointing out that Web 2.0 and SOA both foster greater business agility and productivity.
Though they have a lot in common, and are both about online, on-demand delivery of services, Web 2.0 and SOA typically have been on two separate tracks. In fact, there’s occasionally even been talking that Web 2.0 eclipsing SOA as a preferred path to agility. Web 2.0 is seen as fast-moving, encouraging collaboration, social networking, mashups, and software as a service. SOA is seen as slow-moving, concentrating on service-enablement of IT resources.
But Web 2.0 and SOA appear to be converging on three levels:
• Web 2.0 collaborative environments — blogs, wikis, social networking sites — can facilitate better communication between IT groups and business users as they build and deploy SOA. SOA is an enterprise-wide project, and the work should be transparent and accessible.
• Web 2.0 mashups are part of a new generation of composite applications that make SOA accessible to business end-users. It’s now becoming possible for business end-users to develop their own services, rather than waiting for IT. (SOA governance can also play a role in managing the proliferation of such services.)
• SOA is granularizing applications to the point that Software as a Service becomes a viable option.
Answering the big question: why SOA? Today's IT organizations invariably employ disparate systems and technologies. Most analysts predict that J2EE and .NET will continue to coexist in most organizations .The trend of employing heterogeneous technologies IT solutions will continue. Moreover, creating applications that leverage these different technologies has historically been a difficult task. SOA provides a clear solution to these application integration issues by allowing systems to expose their functionality via standardized, interoperable interfaces.