Tad Anderson posted about the release of an SOA-related e-book from Microsoft concerning Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This is one area in which Microsoft has remained notably quiet compared with competing enterprise software vendors such as IBM and Sun. As Tad points out in his post, Microsoft has made some forays into SOA publications and they have been pretty readable.
Their most recent publication, SOA in the Real World (mirrored here), is one of the better pieces of SOA writing that I’ve encountered, vendor-specific or otherwise. It uses Microsoft technologies to illustrate certain principles but it manages to maintain a largely implementation-agnostic viewpoint. The e-book has multiple authors but it was edited together in a very seamless way, which is not always the easiest thing to pull off.
If you work in the IT world today, you have a greater chance of not finding a Starbucks on a randomly selected block in Manhattan than you do of not hearing the term “SOA” during your daily workday. It’s unfortunately not nearly as often that I hear or read something about SOA that sounds reasonable, practicable, and overcomes my otherwise skeptic view of all the hype that so often masquerades as SOA. The recent ITConverations Podcast with Todd Biske and Ed Vasquez from MomentumSI is just the sort of real-world advice that avoids the hype and gives a heavy dose of ground truth reality.
In my efforts to understand what drives software reuse or the lack thereof, I’ve been looking for formal reuse standards, processes, and practices. I’ve been examining technology agnostic materials as well as researching the approaches taken by each of the respective major camps – software factories for Microsoft and Model Driven Development (MDD) from the Java community. This post, in particular, is more concerned with technology agnostic materials.
Being a long time believer in Scott Ambler’s Enterprise Unified Process (EUP), the strategic reuse discipline contained in the EUP was the first place I turned for process guidance. The reuse discipline, like the rest of the EUP disciplines, is structured in the same fashion as any other RUP discipline, which makes learning pretty intuitive if you’re familiar with the RUP. The workflow of the strategic reuse discipline is illustrated in the image below. The workflow is pretty straightforward and the harvest, buy, build, evolve approach to the preparation of assets agrees with what I’ve observed in practice. If you’re interested in this process, you can check out a brief synopsis of the strategic reuse discipline or purchases Scott’s book on the EUP.
Over the last several months, I’ve really been trying to get my arms around SOA and develop a meaningful opinion and knowledge base on this so often used, even more often abused, and ever-more-frequently maligned three letter acronym (TLA). Along the way, I’ve discovered a couple of great resources that have helped shape my thinking and hone my implementation skills on the topic:
Prentice Hall’s Service-Oriented Computing Series – Right now this series consists of just two books by Thomas Erl, “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design” and “Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services”. These two books, however, are tantamount to the old and new testament; literally comprising the SOA bible. The series is also slated to be expanded into a more complete collection, along the lines of Addison-Wesley’s Martin Fowler and Kent Beck signature series.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted my last entry. To get myself back in the groove of things, I thought that it might be nice to post something lighthearted and entertaining that your average tech weenie would enjoy. Now I don’t know if you follow the gurus of the technology world but my research has turned up a set of long lost brothers amongst the talking (or blogging) heads. Check out the two pictures below. The one on the left is Bruce Schneier, cryptography and computer security wunderkind and designer of several cryptographic algorithms, including Blowfish and Twofish. The one on the right is Martin Fowler, refactoring, pattern, and agile god.