The SOA Magazine

Issue XXXVI, February 2010

The Building Blocks of SOA
by Sihyung Park

Although SOA has been around for years confusion still remains on what "SOA" truly is. For many, embarking upon learning SOA often results in too much upfront detail and information to sort through finding themselves immersed in an overwhelming spell of acronyms and related technologies. Unfortunately the road to understanding SOA leads many into ambiguity and mental fatigue. I've received many requests to provide a high level "forest from the trees" review of SOA. One that provides a non technical manager (or SOA beginner) with a presentation of the fundamentals without the technical implementation details and related technologies that would otherwise confuse those who just want to learn the basics...
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SOA with Spring (Part 1)
by Rizwan Ahmed

In this two-part article series, I'll be demonstrating a service-oriented solution architected and configured using Spring, a lightweight, open-source framework that is specifically created to provide a one-stop shop for all your enterprise application development needs using plain JavaBeans. Specific sections will address core architectural concerns such as the Web service infrastructure (specifically as it relates to endpoint setup, message definition, (un)marshalling, and routing), exceptions handling, security infrastructure and the client setup. Demonstrating Spring's modular and pluggable architecture, we start with Spring-WS, the specific Spring module created for Web services and plug-in other Spring modules such as OXM (Object-XML Mapping) specifically to address the Object/XML impedance mismatch, Security for authentication/authorization services...
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SOA Governance - How Best To Embrace it, Part 3: Governance Maturity, Tooling, Vitality and Success Patterns
by Farzin Yashar

If you don't know where you are, a map will not help. If you don't know where you are going, any road will do. Usually, a maturity level provides a way to predict future performance within a given discipline or set of disciplines. But, most importantly, it helps to identify the gaps and helps in prioritizing the areas that are in need of development, improvement or enhancement. Hence, it tells you where you are and helps you to put a roadmap together. Regardless of the current level of maturity, you need to understand that SOA governance maturity cannot be achieved overnight. It requires total commitment and some if not total culture change...
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McLuhan's old saying "The medium is the message." takes on a whole new meaning when exploring today's growing list of service implementation mediums and related message technology innovations. The author teams I am currently working with are experiencing this on many levels and within different contexts as at least two of the books ("SOA with .NET" and "SOA with Java") that were planned for release in 2009 have been delayed in order to incorporate recent advances pertaining to REST and Cloud Computing (so much so that the former book title has been renamed to "SOA with .NET & Azure").

For those of you that have been waiting for these titles (and have e-mailed me on several occasions to ask exactly when they are coming out), your patience will pay off, as this new content has not only increased the size of these books but, more importantly, their depth. Exploring service implementation medium alternatives helps highlight the pros and cons of each implementation choice and further helps provide options for how we build and evolve our SOA ecosystems.

- Thomas Erl, Series Editor and Site Editor