Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The Three Styles of SOA

Ronan Bradley has an interesting article about Oracle's "Three Styles of SOA".

He lists the three styles as:

• SOA based integration
• Modern, composite application development
• Modernising mainframe and legacy applications

... and claims that no vendor has a tool that can do all three.

I must admit that I don't know as much as I should about mainframe modernisation but for the first two, I suggest he takes a look at WebSphere Process Server.

I would argue that it does both - and does both very well.

The reason Process Server can do this is, in part, the Service Component Architecture.  SCA provides a framework for building new composite applications - and does so in a way that makes integration solutions very easy to build (i.e. the metaphors and abstractions that are used in SCA - coarse-grained interfaces, "business objects", etc - are precisely the ones that make typical integration problems easy to solve). In other words, WPS's support of "style 1" is almost a direct consequence of its ability to support "style 2".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh Richard, perhaps you could give us the topics of your five most - and least - popular posts, measured by the number of comments they received? I think that would be very interesting.

Perhaps you should tailor your blog to the audience by covering more of the popular stuff... :P

Richard Brown said...

Strangely, my postings on the finer points of SOA and BPM attract few comments. However, those who do comment (Bruce, James... they know who they are) are "A list" posters and so I assign disproportionate weight to their input.

Of course... I also value *your* input, Henry. You can be an honorary "value" poster if it would make you feel better?