Dave is an internationally known cloud computing and SOA expert. He is a sought-after consultant, speaker, and blogger. In his career, Dave has formed or enhanced many of the ideas behind modern distributed computing including EAI, B2B Application Integration, and SOA, approaches and technologies in wide use today.In addition, Dave is the Editor-in-Chief of SYS-CON's 
I get these about once a week: an e-mail from a Yahoo or Google e-mail account that talks about issues within a large enterprise that are related to building their first instance of SOA. The fact is that most of these e-mails are not around proper approaches or the right enabling techn...Apr. 3, 2008 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 6,933 Replies: 1
Many SOA projects are created out of hype, not need. Clearly many enterprises are 'managing by magazine' and are more concerned about doing something cool rather than doing something helpful. You know the difference, and I'm sure there are both types of projects in your organization to...
Architectures are like archaeology; in essence, layers upon layers of systems, applications, databases, and connections, typically built or procured to solve a tactical problem. Many corporations talk a good game and brag about the strategic long-term direction of the enterprise archit...
While few will disagree that the inefficiencies of existing enterprise architectures have reached a critical level, many count on 'flying under the radar' of those who look at a company's efficiencies. Let's face it; enterprise architecture is very technical and difficult to understand...
Last month I wrote about vendor-driven architectures (VDA), and I had a few vendors ask me to look on the other side of the fence. In essence, to consider how vendors can better address the needs of the customer, considering the new drivers with SOA. Truth be told, I can't believe the ...
When looking at technology buying patterns in the world of SOA, there's one common thread. The Global 2000, and many government agencies, are purchasing from their existing vendors, no matter what the needs or requirements. I call these solutions purchasing 'comfort technologies' since...
With the advent of Web services and SOA, we've been seeking to create architectures and systems that are more loosely coupled. Loosely coupled systems provide many advantages including support for late or dynamically binding to other components while running, and can mediate the differ...
To mark a new standard in the SOA space, I create a Google Alert and sift through the pile of links returned to get the scope of its maturation. I'm currently tracking over 60 standards, starting with SOAP and XML (XML happened way before Google was cool).
So, does testing change with SOA? You bet it does. Unless you're willing to act now, you may find yourself behind the curve as SOA becomes systemic to all that is enterprise architecture, and we add more complexity to get to an agile and reusable state.
Making solutions scale is nothing new. However, the SOA technology and approaches employed recently are largely untested with higher application and information and service management traffic loads. SOA implementers are happy just to get their solutions up and running, but, in many cas...
If you've kept up with SaaS and SOA you know that Salesforce.com does an on-demand SOA solution. Apex is its on-demand development and deployment platform, including a complete development environment, programming language, database, and now the ability to create, expose, and consume W...
While the notion of SOA continues to emerge, those who are implementing SOAs today are faced with a variety of challenges, including the complexities of SOA, and the work involved with understanding their existing problem domain and requirements. Those who want to get SOA right the fir...
This is the larger issue, as I see it, and is very visible to me working both in the world of SOA and the world of enterprise architecture. So, why are they different worlds? Moreover, what is enterprise architecture, and how does it fit with reference models and reference architecture...
The SOA reference architecture (RA) provides a bridge between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the SOA Reference model and the implementation of a SOA. The SOA reference architecture models the abstract architectural elements for a SOA independent of the technologies, protocols, ...
I spent a few hours of my weekend attempting to research and define these concepts a bit better, in essence, taking everyone's opinions and normalizing them so they make better sense. What I found were many of the same notions, defined differently, but all attempting to solve the same ...
First, the history. Data integration is the name the vendors have adopted to replace the ETL (Extract Translate Load), data cleansing, and data warehousing tools of days gone by. These tools actually pre-date the notion of EAI, and were really the first sets of technology designed to d...
I'm consulting now...at the project and strategy levels...and finding that a lot of real work needs to be done to get SOAs up and running. For most organizations, the first step of their SOA project is to figure out how much this SOA will cost. So you can budget appropriately and get t...
A few of my clients are now looking to staff their first inroads into SOA, their first project where something actually happens beyond the investigation. So...how many people are needed on the project? Who are they? What are their roles? Here are some rough guidelines based upon my exp...
Working directly on SOA projects as an independent I'm exposed to many more organizations than when I was building technology. As such, I see some common patterns or issues emerging. The largest and most disturbing is the fact that there seems to be a huge chasm yawning between the tra...
Last month an alliance of leading vendors announced progress on specifications to define a language-neutral programming model for application development in SOA environments. They call this specification Open SOA Collaboration. In essence, they are proposing a new standard to create an...
Right now the implementation of SOAs seems involve much more hype than actual work. However, there are some patterns beginning to emerge, or, procedures the implementers are doing right to insure success. These patterns are not always obvious, so perhaps this is a good time to learn th...
Let's face it, WS-BPEL 1.1 was not a great standard, and left so much out that many end users and vendors found it useless. In response, the vendors put a ton of proprietary extensions in their BPEL 1.1-based products, thus diluting its value to the point of 'Why bother?' This was a di...
What is unique about an SOA is that it's as much of a strategy as a set of technologies, and it's really more of a journey than a destination. Moreover, it's a notion that is dependent upon specific technologies or standards, such as Web services and interface technology, but really re...
So what's hot these days in the world of SOA? Governance, registries, orchestration...? Nope. As folks looking to implement SOA seek that first killer project the emphasis is on what to do, not what you use, and that's exactly the right way to think. As SOA becomes more of a reality am...
It has come to my attention that there are really two kinds of SOA technology vendors out there, old school and new school - each offering very different approaches to solving the SOA problem. I'm not going to mention any particular vendors, but you guys can guess who they are.
There is a lot of talk about how SOA will significantly lower the need for developers, thus the savings of SOA. This will be accomplished through the promise of reuse that's driving many toward the SOA light. However, I'm not sure we'll see a reduction in development with the advent of...
I caught a review in Fast Company of an interview that Craig Newmark of Craigslist had with ABC's Nightline News. I didn't see the interview myself, but Fast Company did a good job highlighting the more important points, including the fact that Craigslist, which offer free classified a...
The notion of building bridges to service providers and managing the interaction will become more commonplace in 2006 as we learn to accept that many services we leverage within an enterprise are services we may not host. The technology exists today. We need to define and refine our ap...
Truth be told, traditional approaches to integration are really about keeping persistence at the points, within the source or target systems, and replicating data as needed. However with the use of true services, there is a clear advantage in keeping some persistence at a central-tier,...
Web services were created around the notion that it's easier to discover and leverage somebody else's service rather than write your own from scratch. Also, it is much easier to create applications made up of many services, thereby allowing change to occur at a pace faster than anythin...
Why do we do what we do? I mean, why do we design and implement SOAs? The truth is we do so to improve our business, thereby making it more adaptable and ready to accept change without major disruptions. However, what does this mean to the bottom line?
As we discussed last month, performance is often an afterthought when building new systems, including SOAs. We're finding that services and SOAs fall victim to this oversight as well. Indeed, there is a right way and a wrong way to design a service and an SOA. Also, there are things th...
Performance is often an afterthought when building new systems, and I'm finding that services are no exception. Truth be told, most services out there just function. They are not optimized to scale, and SOAs are running into walls as those services hit the upper limit. If we don't lear...
