At the time I thought I just didn’t understand ESB and SOA, but now I think no-one has really figured how to do it in a real enterprise enviroment with all the complexities and legacy things involved.

To me, SOA looks like the best thing ever to consultants. The one big advantage of selling SOA is that it involves lots of custom work, aka middleware. In more and more commoditized world of IT, that’s a gold mine.

I remember reading a Forrester paper on some successful (three or four) SOA projects. One was the Australian DMV and the other a Swiss airport, if my memory works. The other cases mentioned in the paper, at least to my mind, weren’t “real” SOA things anyway.

The way I also understand it, there isn’t a clear standard for SOA yet, so technically a SOA-company could just buy up a lot of SaaS-applications, bundle them together and call it SOA, no? From a recent interview I had, it seemed to me that this is exactly what some companies are doing.

Looks like I’ll have a number of topics to discuss tomorrow. I’ll report back if something interesting comes out of it.

Behind the Enterprise firewall these web services are still used to have heterogeneous systems (eg mainframe, ERP, Web Apps) in the same company to communicate in real time.

historically, the first tool used for this interoperability has been ETL : Extract Transfer & Load. This is just server software extracting data one system (usually the DB) -eg Web App-, transform it to be compliant and inject it it into the DB of another (eg Mainframe). However this is heavy and most of the time not real time.

Then came EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) with big products such as Tibco, WebMethods, SeeBeyond. This was complex, extremely expensive and proprietary.

Then came SOA with standards (SOAP, XML etc …) and the idea was to have all different systems to encapsulate their services into a SOA enveloppe so that they can communicate in real time together.

Ultimately the idea is to use an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) to orchestrate all the services, using BPL (Business Process Langage) for Business Analyst (i.e non technical resources) to be able to code business rules at a very high and nonb technical level.

This sounds great but it’s not so easy : When I had this ESB training the other day, the instructor could not tell us about any successful productive implementation of an ESB. And he even was skeptical about SOA saying that this services should remain very basics.

Software as a Service on a web is a different thing though. The API is easier and there is no such heavy protocol as SOAP for instance.

So, I checked out the presentation, thanks. I have to say that I’m a little confused. I always thought that the Services in SOA meant web-services (just like in SaaS and S+S), so I assumed that SOA was meant to use the open standards of the web. Actually, I read several articles where that same assumption was vocalised. So is that REST now???

I have an interview tomorrow and will also ask about this.

This objective of allowing individuals and businesses to focus on what they do best has been the driving force of the IT industry for the last decade or so. But then you end up with some type of technology monsters such as EJB which after being the trendiest software component in the early 00s is now the favorite subjects of jokes for enterprise geeks. SOA is about the same.

Initially IT Architects were dreaming of using Web Services to be able to publish services on the web and then people would locate them (thanks to a dictionnary) use it and pay for it. This business model coming out of fantaisy land soon died. Because of SOA which added a lot of complexity (SOAP Protocol) to something initially dead simple (Remote Procedure Call in XML format over HTTP.

So this initial business model soon died and SOA scope has been narrowed down to enterpise IT systems integration.

But still, enterprise SOA projects are still too complicated : only 1 project out of 5 succeed (http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/07/Only1).

What is currently happening is IT people moving away from SOA (bloated, heavy, complex) and going a more webby approach for interoperability, using Resources Oriented Architecture with REST (Representional State Transfer) paradigm. Have a look to this excellent presentation by Martin Fowler and Jim Weeb, the first being a worldwide famous software architecture guru : http://www.infoq.com/presentations/soa-without-esb

C.

Do a search for “Lego” and “computer” in Google’s image search, and I’m sure your dream PC will be revealed on page 2.