News
Microsoft Releases 'SOA in the Real World' E-Book
- By Chris Kanaracus
- July 24, 2007
For a while now, Microsoft has published guidance materials to help companies develop service-oriented architectures. The company recently made a substantial addition to those stores with a 196-page
e-book entitled "SOA in the Real World."
The text touches upon what it calls the "never-ending debate about what is or isn't SOA." (The book, for its part, defines SOA as "a loosely coupled architecture designed to meet the business needs of the organization.")
There is also a SOA fact vs. myth section, which includes such observations as "No vendor will ever offer a 'complete' SOA stack because SOA needs vary from one organization to another. Purchasing your SOA infrastructure from a single vendor defeats the purpose of investing in SOA."
The statement runs counter to Microsoft's recent announcement of the Service-Oriented Architecture & Business Process pack, a bundle of development tools, back-end components and guidance materials for developing SOAs. (RDN covered this in greater detail.)
The e-book also includes an architectural rendering that shows how the company's various technologies can be assembled into a platform for SOA.
The top layer, titled "Integrated Tools & Modeling," consists of Visual Studio.
The middle tier is broken into five sections: Messaging/Services, Workflow/Process, Data, User Interaction and Identity/Access. A wide array of Microsoft technologies are listed, including Windows Communication Foundation for messaging, Windows Presentation Foundation for UI and Cardspace for identity management.
The bottom tier is labeled "Integrated Management & Governance" and includes the System Center family, Microsoft Operations Manager, Windows System Update Service and Microsoft Operations Framework.
The book's other sections include a discussion of composite applications; an examination of workflow and process; and explorations of various issues concerning SOA and data.