Implementing SOA successfully

Martin Percival of BEA Systems outlines a 10-point plan for implementing SOA at the UK National Computing Centre Web site.

"A practical way to achieve this is by identifying key pain points, usually something like a broken business process or a requirement to get a single coherent view of customer information," he writes.

"These examples often require the integration and co-ordination of data that may span multiple applications and business processes and can be good use cases for the principles of SOA. In addition, by involving business users in the process, a business can inspire their support and active participation, which can also lead to the development of solid business cases for SOA. "

Merely following Web services (WS) standards won't guarantee interoperability in an enterprise architecture environment, says Sanjay Narang at Sys-Con. The newer WS specifications make things trickier, because they are non-standard and do not have wide support.

"As the Web services industry evolves, it embraces new specifications like WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-AtomicTransactions to provide advanced functionalities such as security, reliability and transactions that are not provided by the basic specifications.

"These specifications are generally referred to as the WS-* (pronounced WS-Star) specifications. As they are relatively new and have not been so widely agreed on by the industry, achieving interoperability between Web services that use WS-* specifications is much more difficult and the WS-* specifications may not even be supported in many products."

Founder and CEO of Parasoft, Dr Adam Kolawa, foresees an explosion of Web services this year.

"They are so easy to expose," he said to Sys-Con. "Once exposed, Web services basically create interfaces which can be re-used. This will significantly reduce the amount of code that needs to written, which will in turn cut the demand for 'bare bones' development.

"To use these related Web services to achieve your business goals, you need to consider how high-level operations pass through the Web services, then determine how to implement this high-level flow from start to finish. This can be accomplished in two ways: by programmatically coding the application logic required to tie the involved elements together, and by using an orchestration tool to direct the flow through the involved elements, which remain separate. I predict the latter method will be the favourite because it is easier."