More on SOA and (WS-*) Standards

Today, I presented on Sun SOA at our Software Summit attended by Sun and our partner folks. There were lots of comments and feedback on my presentation and there were some pretty good discussions.

A discussion touched upon the topic of SOA and Standards which I blogged about a while ago. On one of the slides, I was trying to address the confusion about SOA and Web Services by saying that SOA != WebServices, but that Web Services was the current popular implementation that seems to be gaining traction with our customers and the industry. And a few slides later I showed a picture (see image map below) to show how we were trying to grasp all the standards (approved, emerging, conflicting and so forth) mapped to different SOA aspects.

I might have confused my dear audience a little (can't blame them!), because on one hand I was saying that SOA != WebServices, and on the other hand most of the standards I was mapping to different SOA aspects were Web Services related. But the reality is that SOA today is being mostly viewed from a WebServices implementation perspective. What do you think?

PS: On the plus side, it was great to meet the John Clingan and other Sun bloggers in person.

YouRIt

Posted on: Nov 10, 2005

Posted by: alur

Category: Architecture

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Comments:

I run into the same situation as you when talking SOA to customers. I've found that one of the causes of the confusion is that SOA emerged out of the B2B and WebService technologies/principles and then became a buzz-word for how the enterprise should construct internal, A2A communication to support business agility. People are confused by the different requirements of externally facing services and internally facing services. (external and internal to the organisation)

Many of the standards and technologies that are required to achieve interop for B2B services are not necessary for internal A2A or may be compromised to meet other non-functional requirements.

SOA within an enterprise is just Information Hiding using the latest technologies and standards. Conforming to WS-I basic security profile might be necessary to offer external facing services to your customers. But these webservice standards may be overkill for internal service to service comms where simple xml through your jbi-compliant ESB is more than enough to achieve the loose-coupling required for business agility.

Posted by Jason Baragry on November 14, 2005 at 12:53 PM PST #

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