SOA beyond the hype

The SOA-storm has tempered down. The extremely enthusiastic opinion-makers are cooling down. The hype is over, and SOA is there to stay. Tools are evolving toward maturity and enterprises are serious in adopting the architectural style of SOA. A new layer of governance, the hardest part of SOA, will slowly grow on top of today's IT-governance once the new CIO has convinced the board. Roadmaps are in place.

What next? Build and implement new applications with new technologies and new standards, conforming to new architectures. And that leads to new challenges: Selecting the right tools to design, build and implement SOA-based applications; defining services and compose them into business process implementations. And building the services in core code.

To get a picture of the current state, I ordered two books from Packt Publishing:

• Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide

• SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009

I've chosen Packt Publishing as this publisher demands a practical perspective from its authors: concepts must be clearly linked to feasible implementations with available tools. You may click the links above to find out about the structure and content of these books.

Both books give a good overview of the respective products Oracle SOA Suite 10gR3 and BizTalk Server 2009. In both books the authors drill down from conceptual patterns to implementation solutions including code snippets and screen shots of the tools in practice. In this respect both books are worthwhile reading, depending on the tools your company is using, to allow yourself a head start. Or - as I did - just to get an idea of the capabilities of tools currently available.

I was surprised by the Oracle book. The authors did not only present a very clear picture implementing conceptual patterns with Oracle's SOA Suite, but they went one step further upwards in the design realm. This book explains higher level SOA design principles, such as the arrangement of services in different layers of concern and e.g. the great benefits of using proxies in front of the business services. This book has earned a special place on my bookshelf as it offers excellent insights in good SOA-design - from an IT-development point of view - which can be implemented with currently available tools.

The author of the BizTalk book walks quite another road. The author explains the Microsoft concept of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and how BizTalk relates to it. A bunch of patterns is described including orchestration, schemas and endpoints, versioning and asynchronous communications. Finally the book mentions the new SOA capabilities of BizTalk 2009: a set of supporting services, components and patterns called "ESB Guidance 2.0". Some low level SOA design principles come to the scene as well in a chapter called "Planning Service Oriented BizTalk Solutions". This chapter focuses on the concepts of a service and the different types of services including variations of request/response services and one-way services.

The difference between the two books is that the Oracle book might be seen as a SOA design guide, extensively illustrated by applying the Oracle SOA Suite; it has a main focus on the BPEL level (business processes). The BizTalk book is just a BizTalk guide; it has a main focus on the (web)service level and doesn't even mention BPEL.

And what about the current maturity of these tools? Build/Test/Acceptance/Production workflow-support and support for configuration-items (build) control is very poor (non-existent) as far as I could determine, but nevertheless I think both products are mature enough to be used in developing real life SOA solutions. The users of these tools need a good understanding of the SOA-design principles and modern XML-based technologies and standards in order to create added values. The learning curve will be rather steep, but once being accustomed to one tool it will be rather easy to switch to the other tool. And the pace of developing - and modifying - systems will really increase compared to what we are used to.