There’s no shame in expressing skepticism that SOA is nirvana, but our August Cover Story does find reasons for optimism that the technology could benefit IT development and integration projects.
With offices in 35 countries, Future Electronics, the third largest electronic distributor in the world, has developed its own enterprise apps to run its operations. But the firm needed a way to integrate all of its global systems.
“A couple of years ago, we began breaking down application suites into XML-based service methods,” said Steve Flammini, CTO at Partners Healthcare, headquartered in Boston. This began to move the IT infrastructure for the multibillion dollar integrated health care delivery system into the Web services world.
Lydian Trust is a mid-sized financial services company based in Palm Beach, Fla. Although it was only founded in 1999, its services, including private banking and wealth management, had expanded by mid-2002 to the point where it had outgrown its original IT systems built on Microsoft Windows .COM. John Studdard’s job was to move to the .NET platform with a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that would allow development teams to build Web services applications without having to worry about the basic XML-based standards or architecture.
At NxTrend Technology Inc., Web services allowed the company to continue to use its established transaction engine while putting on a most “modern” face for other systems, indicated Ross Elliott, vice president and chief strategy officer at the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based supply distribution software house.
Integration brokers are increasingly becoming part of application platforms from the major vendors, including IBM, Microsoft and BEA, according to analysts at the Burton Group.
Never underestimate the power of a name -- or in this case, a category. Now that the enterprise service bus (ESB) has been officially identified by IT industry watchers, life is a little easier for companies like Cape Clear Software. "Our products have always been based on ESB," Cape Clear co-founder David Clark told eADT over lunch in Palo Alto recently, "but we've had to spend a lot of time explaining ourselves to our customers. Now that [industry analysts at] Gartner have put us in the ESB category, we've got something to hang our hat on."
If SOA is going to move from "academic" to practical application, developers will need better mechanisms for managing identity issues from single-sign-on to service-level agreements, says Ian Goldsmith, VP, product marketing at Digital Evolution.
Whether the W3C vision of the Semantic Web can be implemented in the real world may be debatable. But XML-based semantic technologies do have potential to be useful within the enterprise, contends Mike Champion, senior technologist with Software AG Inc., Reston Va.
RSA, Bsafe SWS-J, may spell relief for Java coders working on Web services applications. The new product provides security mechanisms based on the Oasis WS-Security standard that developers can simply add to their application.
From confidentiality, integrity, and availability to authentication, authorization, and audit, find out how you can employ best practices to make Web services secure.
Much has been made about the current state of Web services standards development. And yet plenty of developers aren't waiting around for the standards to coalesce (or congeal, as one writer put it).
This site is trying to become the online hub for Web Services and SOA activity.
Peter O'Kelly, an analyst with the Burton Group, says that the flavor-of-the-month time for XML standards may be coming to a merciful end.
Rally Release 1, described as an on-demand software development management solution, can ease Agile software development by providing visibility into organizations and synchronizing distributed development teams, contend officials at Rally Software Development Co., Boulder, Colo.