"We didn't start the fire ... it was always burning since the world's been turning ..." [Billy Joel 1989]. Is SOA the "Same Old Architecture?" or is it "Simply Over Ambitious?" Let's apply SOA's arsenal:: XML, BPM, Services, SOAP, Web Services - to the real world and find out. Let's put out some fires.

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SOA at the data level?

While the strategic concerns of business-IT alignment is being touted as the primary USP of SOA based initiatives, with a view to making the business processes flexible while leveraging the standards based loosely coupled IT interfaces offered by SOA, such strategic adoption is still not commonplace yet. However, SOA is quitely making inroads in more tactical projects involving information integration scenarios be it legacy data integration, EII, or portals.

The advantage of applying SOA at data layer, is manyfold. Primarily it offers a mechanism to streamline data access across heterogeneous sources, which was earlier done with quite cumbersome custom mechanisms. Further, it brings about a uniform interface to carry out shared tasks like common schema/data definition, shared security etc. for diverse data sources. An important effect is also in seen in form of a more regulated pattern of entry / exit to data sources, which in conventional deployments would be a mess of point to point connections. For more on shared data services and their role in SOA see the following articles:

1. Leveraging shared data services in data integration, by Krishnendu Kunti, Mohit Chawla, Vikram Sitaram, in SETLabs briefings, Vol 1, Service Oriented Architecture, 2007, pp 3-8 , accessible http://www.infosys.com/technology/toc-soa-managing-hype.asp or http://www.infosys.com/technology/setlabs-briefings-soa.pdf 

2. International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP'06)   pp. 49-55, An approach to automating transactions in a data services platform, Srinivas padmanabhuni et al. Accessible http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/NWESP.2006.7 

3. V. Niranjan, Sriram Anand, Krishnendu Kunti: Shared Data Services: An Architectural Approach. ICWS 2005: pp 683-690, Accessible http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1530861&isnumber=32665

Posted by Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni on May 7, 2007 06:23 AM |

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Comments

As we focus on SOA at data level, one gets back to basic question of interoperability using web services. We still have challenges to meet our interoperability as a primary non functional requirement. Can anyone throw light on best practices of interoperability using web services, e.g, in .NET ?

Posted by: rajesh | November 8, 2007 09:23 AM

Rajesh, you may want to refer to the following

1. WS-I Basic Profile: A Practitioner's View (research paper) - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1010137&jmp=indexterms&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=7048421&CFTOKEN=57292554

2. MSDN Site - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700845.aspx

3. Improve interoperability between J2EE technology and .NET, Part 1 - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/ws-tip-j2eenet1/. There are links to part 2 and 3 towards the end in this article

Posted by: Atul Gupta | November 8, 2007 12:34 PM

Pages mentioned here for shared data services and their role in SOA are not available.It'll be really great if we can get updated links here.

Posted by: Gulal Kumar | September 30, 2009 05:36 AM

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