It’s always good to get an idea of the big picture before diving into the details of any technology-centric topic. For this reason, we’ll take the time to briefly mention the overarching goals and benefits associated with service-oriented computing as they relate to Web Service contrac...

When Enterprise Architecture is able to prove that it can bridge the business vision to IT’s tactical operations, its function will no longer be Hype and EA staff members will no longer need to Hope they won’t be cut. Enterprise Architecture will become an organization without which th...

The Java Community Process requires the development of not only technical specifications, but also Reference Implementations (which prove that specs can be implemented) and conformance test suites (Technology Compatibility Kits or TCKs), which are used to verify that implementations co...

Recently industry analysts, press, and bloggers have been writing about the state of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and whether it’s “dead” or in the “trough of disillusionment." These discussions have been fueled by surveys that suggest a decline in the number of organizations co...

Whenever IT professionals discuss the benefits of SOA – full utilization of IT resources, reduced infrastructure costs, and the agility to deliver new services quickly – they usually issue a caveat. They warn potential adopters of the inherent complexity of SOA, and point out that unle...

For many people, even entire organizations, the approach to education seems to be along the lines of learning facts, figures, details, tools and standards. This results in a shallow understanding of both the business problem and the new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategies av...

SOA is continuing to gain widespread adoption and find success beyond pilot and project implementations, according to recent surveys. There is a steady increase in organizations moving to enterprise-wide SOA deployments. Those that have found success maturing to large-scale SOA have on...

The definition of remote working is changing. Whether an employee is telecommuting or working at a branch office, they require the same connectivity to headquarters, to each other, and to business applications such as inventory and sales data. Many SMEs use the Internet to provide conn...

The health care industry, including hospitals, has the greatest need for sophisticated information systems because of the enormous amount of data it handles and because of its life-and-death responsibilities. Yet the implementation of large-scale and robust-enough IT systems in public ...

A picture is worth a thousand words. We all have heard this saying a countless number of times. But what if you don’t understand what is drawn in the picture? I was approached once with a request to review requirements specifications for some module. The document contained a scheme tha...

One of the key concepts to consider when talking about services and cloud computing is the notion of coupling. We need to focus on this since, in many instances, coupling is not a good architectural choice considering that the services are not only hosted within separate data centers, ...

There is a lot going on in the cloud computing space, and SOA is clearly along for the ride. Indeed, there are many things that cloud computing providers (and that’s a rather big category these days) and those building SOAs can learn from each other. I’m just scratching the surface her...

Application servers, those dependable workhorses that run most enterprise Java applications, are rarely a hot topic of conversation these days. As a technology category, the application server appears to be fairly “established” and that the focus has moved elsewhere in the stack, but a...

I wrote in my previous article, “Interactive Storyboarding with JSP,” that interactive storyboarding is an effective way to define better requirements by eliciting actual business user needs. And I proposed to describe the requirements inJSPs with the J-CASE tag library, which enables ...

Server, storage and site migrations have always been the elephant in the room. IT managers know that it is necessary to reduce costs and improve workload management but cringe over the potential impact to production. In the past, migrations have usually required significant planning, d...

A service inventory is a living body of services that individually will need the freedom to evolve independently over time. What we learned when documenting the SOA design pattern catalog is that there are patterns that emerged not only at design-time but also during this post-implemen...

The rise of Enterprise Architecture (EA) should be no surprise to any of us, and yet every day businesses either opt out of deploying enterprise architecture, or can’t deploy it effectively. While the Industrial Age was characterized by process-based advances such as assembly lines and...

The increased manageability, reliability, and opportunities for reuse promised by a SOA can only be fulfilled with an effective governance structure in place to coordinate service creation, maintenance, provisioning, and consumption. However, many small and medium-sized organizations s...

Storage virtualization for the sake of storage virtualization isn’t enough these days. Being able to pool heterogeneous resources and migrate data from point A to point B while the application is up and running is pretty cool, but what businesses really need are complete solutions – so...

Part 1 of this interview talked about spaghetti and lasagne. Part 2 focuses on ESB, SOA, and the importance of thinking of the business first and last. This is the second part of a two-part interview with Peter Hermans, noted SOA consultant and former architect at a major European tele...

SOA consultant Peter Hermans oversaw a major SOA implementation at a large European telco. Now he talks about what he learned, and what you can learn as you get involved with SOA. Spaghetti and lasagne are involved. This is the first part of a two-part interview.

The 80/20 rule has negative implications for traditional IT reousrce allocation, with the 80 percent going to maintenance, and only 20 percent to innovation. How can you innovate with SOA to flip this ratio on its head?

Think in terms of all of your IT assets as part of a portfolio of innovation, and it becomes easier to think of you to put them to creative use that drives operational efficiency.

Like data normalization, the Service Normalization pattern is intent on reducing redundancy and waste in order to avoid the governance burden associated with having to maintain and synchronize similar or duplicate bodies of service logic. When designing data architectures, you can easi...

As SOA moves from the project level to the enterprise, SOA architects and practitioners quickly realize the need to consider common services and data management issues. Today we seek the right approaches and the proper enabling technology and standards to provide our enterprises with a...

Business and government agencies execute better when they make decisions based on complete and accurate information. However, amassing flawless information becomes more challenging as entities evolve. As organizations expand into multiple geographies, their information assets become fr...

Industry research shows that while many companies believe SOA is beneficial, only a few have reached a level of maturity that lets them to reap real benefits. The relative immaturity of SOA across IT organizations, however, presents an opportunity to structure the SOA program in the mo...

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has captured the attention and energy of CIOs across the globe given its tantalizing promise of IT agility and business responsiveness. As more companies look to bring the benefits of a SOA approach to their IT processes, a clear pattern of adoption ...

CIOs see operational excellence as the "table stakes" in the high-roller game of IT. Often thought of as the starting point to creating value for the business in this game, businesses use IT for competitive advantage, and the business that is most successful wins. However, operational ...

In May of 2003, the CIO of the Department of Defense established the Net-Centric Data Strategy. Since then, many programs within the DoD have embarked on the journey of making their systems more “net-centric" by applying principles of service-oriented architectures and using web servi...

The internationally acclaimed book "SOA Design Patterns" (Erl et al., ISBN: 0136135161, Prentice Hall, 2009) documents a catalog of 85 patterns and is the latest title in the “Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl” (www.soabooks.com). Thomas Erl, the world’s t...

Web services have opened opportunities to integrate the applications at an enterprise level irrespective of the technology they have been implemented in. IBM's CICS transaction server for z/OS v3.1 can support web services. It can help expose existing applications as web services or de...

Should a service only be considered a service if it's reusable? The answer to this question, as asserted by this pattern, is a firm "no." While agnostic services (services providing multi-purpose logic with reuse potential, as per the Agnostic Context pattern), receive the most attenti...

Regardless of the class of SOA you subscribe to, there is a general underlying value proposition that is common to all classes: a means for independent objects to work together for a common purpose. When entities remain independent, but can work together, they can be used for multiple ...

You need SOA governance, design time, and runtime. However, SOA governance does not come out of a box. Simply put, it's really a matter of people and processes put in place to ensure that the services are designed, deployed, and operated as effectively as possible. However, people and ...

With power comes responsibility. The promise of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers significant opportunity for service reuse and the realization of a fully integrated enterprise. But left unchecked, the flexibility enabled by an SOA will result in a Wild Wild West of enterprise...

A few years ago, a British newspaper speculated on what might be the Web equivalent of the Seven Wonders of the World, and received suggestions that were hardly surprising: Google search, the Amazon.com e-tail portal, the eBay auction mechanism, etc. But that was back in 1991, before F...

How does SOA work, how can it be used? And what is WOA? With the use of a real-world example,this article describes why a properly planned and implemented Service Oriented Architecture can create a flexible way of aligning business and IT.

In the past, test “scripts” in TM tools were largely recorded as actual step-by-step instructions (in a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet) for a manual tester to point-and-click through a finished interface to test the application. When tests were completed, the tester would then “check a ...

In this series we are going to look at four aspects of the Agile lifecycle: test & quality management, application lifecycle management, IT operations, monitoring and performance, IT and SOA governance. For years, testing was an siloed activity that used different and unconnected tools...