SOA far, SOA good

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 15 Feb 2007

Service-orientated architecture (SOA) is finally finding its place in the IT world, according to feedback from the recent Enterprise Architecture Practitioners (EAP) Conference in San Diego, California, hosted by The OpenGroup.

Addressing criticism that SOA is a temporary fad, Chris Harding, OpenGroup's SOA director, said architecture, not technology, was the driver for SOA. "SOA stands for 'services', 'orientation' and 'architecture', nowhere does it provide for 'objects', 'components', 'Web services' or anything technological," he said.

Harding said The OpenGroup's definition of SOA and services was becoming respected as a standard. "SOA is an architectural style that supports service orientation and a service is a repeatable business activity that has a specified outcome, such as check credit," he explained.

Asked to what extent SOA was revolutionary or evolutionary, Harding replied that while SOA was a logical development of what went before, it was also achieving some things that object-orientated programming set out to achieve but perhaps didn't quite attain.

"The world moves on. SOA is where we are now and, from the input we are getting, it is not just a passing fad," he said.

Maja Tibbling, lead enterprise architect at Con-way, a large US transport company, added that while the same architectural principles already existed in 1995, the implementing technologies were different.

"The part that matters here is the ability to define the right services, and that will not be a passing fad because that is where the value lies - not in the implementing technology," she said.

According to Tibbling, technology will continue to evolve. "If you do your services right you'll be able to advance, adjust and take advantage of whatever technology comes along. That is where the understanding of what SOA is will help enterprise architects understand what they are dealing with," she said.

The Open Group is a vendor-neutral and technology-agnostic consortium, whose vision of "Boundaryless Information Flow" is aimed at enabling access to integrated information, within and among enterprises, based on open standards and global interoperability.