Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one of the hottest buzzwords in enterprise computing right now, although it’s not without its controversies.

Personally, I’m a little over the hype about SOA … I mean, there’s nothing terribly new in all this that I can see - it’s all stuff that we’ve been doing with IBM middleware for years now. I guess SOA just brings together some of the existing design and architecture patterns together under a common name (buzzword).

Heck, even Enterprise Service Bus (ESB - another IBM buzzword) has been around for years … Candle Corporation (now owned by IBM) did something like this at least 6 years ago with their product “Roma” - way ahead of its time. What we didn’t have back then, with any of this SOA stuff is much in the way of standards, which I figure is one important step forwards. The thing I like most about standards is that there are so many to choose from. :rolleyes:

I’ll try and find some material about SOA that helps people understand what it’s all about.

David Gewirtz writes for DominoPower magazine, An interview with IBM’s Chris Lamb on WebSphere Portal SOA

I interviewed Chris Lamb, IBM’s Worldwide Market Manager for IBM WebSphere Portal. In this short question and answer session, Chris discusses Service Oriented Architectures and why SOA is important.

(via Ed Brill)

Colleen Frye writes for SearchDomino.com - Portal services to become key in SOA:

Enterprise portals are not going the way of the dinosaur, but rather are adapting to change: They’re evolving from owners of services to consumers of services. As part of this transformation, the portal server will be replaced by portal services that will consume application and infrastructure services, according to a recent telebriefing on the enterprise portal market from the Burton Group, Midvale, Utah. And for many organizations, the portal will be the initial “face” of their service-oriented architecture.

Also, look for the “superplatform” vendors — BEA Systems Inc., IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corp. and SAP AG — to dominate as the portal becomes an extension of the underlying application platform. “It’s a stack battle,” said Burton principal analyst Mike Gotta.
…
“There are a lot of things coming together all of a sudden,” Gotta said. “It’s not about the portal, but the services and the maturation of the underlying infrastructure. As we get smarter about how we want to package and expose [things like] identity management, content collaboration, [etc.], the portal gets to go back to its roots, which is not so much a portal but a set of services. The portal ends up a consumer of services. Portals will care more about the infrastructure services they consume, which is a key architectural difference between the past generation and the future.”

Quite true I think - with standardisation of the interconnects between the various subsystems of a portal infrastructure, the infrastructure itself becomes less challenging - allowing us to focus the portal on what it’s there for - aggregating business processes, content and collaboration.

Tags:No Tags