SOA

2012-04-06T05:25:00.001-07:00

I have got a new address for my postings so request you to please go to my own address:
www.jtripathi.com or blog.jtripathi.com

You can find all previous posts at new address.

Poll results: Is SOA Still Alive?

2009-08-29T01:31:00.000-07:00

Some time back I posted a poll asking "Is SOA still alive?". I posted this poll because more than six months back a debate was started on it. Please see my previous post. More than six months back I posted a discussion asking will soa die? after Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group posted in her blog: "SOA is dead; Long live services".

Poll Results

I thought I should collect response from people what they think about it. Here are the results of poll which I posted in this blog:-

It is very interesting to see only 55% said "It will stay here for a long time". Other answers are distributed but all of them are negative about SOA. 55% is still winning vote but compare it with hype of SOA when every one was thinking "Every thing will be SOA". Every one started writing books, articles on SOA. Every company started SOA enabling its products.

SOA hype has gone

Important to note here that only 56 votes were caste. Why this cold response to so loved and promising thing called SOA? Not only in this blog but also in my professional network on linkedin I posted same poll and response was 3 votes. Are people not interested in SOA?

Last few months I saw changing trend on internet. Famous online magazines and sites where there was a separate navigation link to SOA related things have removed that link and now put virtualisation, cloud computing etc.

I am not saying that principles of SOA were or are not good but I want to higlight important point here:- Companies create hype and if there is not cream in it they shift their focus and start selling some thing else. Being a technocrat one should not get influenced by these hypes and should take decisions based on their requirements and should not try to fit their requirements and solutions according to what they hype creators say and sell.

Conclusion

Principles of SOA were good and they were derived from past experience and best practices but implementation of those principles should be done according to individual needs. Good SOA principles will live long but products will die.

SOA Design Patterns Poster

2009-08-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

I have contributed "SOA Design Patterns Poster" at soapatterns.org . This poster displays the catalog of patterns from the book SOA Design Patterns (by Thomas Erl, Prentice Hall, Copyright 2008). There are 85 design patters shown in categories with brief description of them. This can be a good reference for SOA architects, designers and developers providing them single view of all patters on a single page (A2 size poster) or two pages (A3 size poster). Posters of both the sizes are available at:-
http://www.soapatterns.org/reference_posters.asp

Which MDM product is the best?

2009-08-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

(Note : You can also vote on this blogs poll to choose best MDM product but I have also posted a detailed feature based survey at Survey Monkey)

MDM is becoming more important and relevant now a days for enterprises. There are tools, products which can help implementing Master Data Management but lots of vendors have launched MDM products in the market. Some are big players and some are small players but specialists. Which product to choose is a question which needs to be answered.

MDM Selection Criteria

Before choosing a product there are some criteria which needs to be prioritized for an organization and on the basis of these criteria a product supporting features in favor of the organizations requirements can be considered. Here are few things which can be considered:

Support for Multiple-Entity types for example customers, accounts, products, etc.
It should have support for requirements of various user types and usage scenarios (analysis, reporting etc.).
Data governance and administration features and capabilities.
Support for unstructured data and search capabilities for it at enterprise level.
Centralised or decentralised repositories support.
Ease of deployment
Pre-built Domain Data Model

Comparison of MDM Products

To compare various MDM products I am conducting a survey through Survey Monkey to get feedback on these features to select a MDM product.
I request you all to vote in this survey. It is a single page survey and doesnt require too much of effer. Just click and finish. Please click here to vote.

This survey will provide enough ground for MDM product comparison. Which one is the best MDM? Answer to this question will depend upon what are the organzations priorities but these features will help them choosing a MDM product based on their priority.

IBM MDM Suite

2009-08-10T13:40:00.000-07:00

MDM product from IBM is known as InfoSphere Server. For web they have WebSphere and for Data (Information) obviously InfoSphere :).
According to IBM site this product provides MDM services for various type of domains :- "customer, account, product, as well as other data types like location".

They have a product called "IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server for Product Information Management". So this is actually PIM but they call it "a core element of a customer’s master data management strategy".

According to IBM website InfoSphere Master Data Management Server: "contains more than 800 business services out-of-the-box to manage both complex and simple master data inquiries and updates."

One thing which looks interesting is IBM's strategy of going multi domain in MDM: all types of master data, whether it is Product or Customer data.

With this I am closing chapter of Introduction to MDM Suites or Products provided by various vendors. It was shared to give a brief information and introduction. Now question is which one is suitable for what scenario? which one to choose? Is there any comparison available?
I will try to put a comparison of MDM products in my coming posts. Before that I have posted a survey on this blog to get feedback from trenches (all of you who have implemented MDM and what do you think is complete and best MDM suite or product?

MDM readiness assesment tool

2009-08-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

TDWI & Baseline computing have designed an assessment tool for MDM readiness. According to TDWI website: "This interactive survey has been designed to help you gauge how prepared your company is to acquire an MDM solution and launch a sustainable MDM program"

It asks about 37 questions on various pages. Questions are based on your general understanding of your organization to figure out what people in your organization think about master data, what do you do to clean duplicate data etc. Based on these and other types of question it sends you a report to your email ID.

Important thing about this survey is it has questions touching various aspects of data:- Quality, Processing, Change Management, Organization, MDM Perception people have in your organization, Rules and Policies, Data Access & Navigation etc. Its report shows your score in various categories as compared to other organization which have undergone this survey.

Since its score is showing your scores as compared to other organizations score it can be useful to know maturity of MDM at your organization. But at the same time it can be erroneous because organizations participated can not be a scale to know your maturity.

SAP Master Data Management

2009-08-09T13:53:00.000-07:00

Master Data Management (MDM) product from SAP is known as "NetWeaver Master Data Management". NetWeaver MDM is part of (one of the component of) SAP's NetWeaver product suite.

SAP NetWeaver is foundation for all SAP applications. It is SAP's SOA platform suite. NetWeaver is built upon open standards and inter-operate with, technologies such as Microsoft .NET, Sun Java EE, and IBM WebSphere. It can be extended by Microsoft .NET of Sun Java EE.

Standard architecture for SAP MDM can have a centralized MDM server and clients connected it. Clients are connected to MDM server through SAP's Exchange Infrastructure using XML documents. Clients can also connect without Exchange Infrastructure.

Implementation scenarios

Centralized cleansing, removal of duplicates and consolidation, key mapping and reporting in SAP BI. In this scenario data is not supposed to be sent to originating systems.
Above mentioned activities along with redistribution of processed data to originating systems.
Maintaining master data at a central MDM system.

SAP purchased A2i in year 2004. A2i was in to Product Information Management. It is believed A2i is capability and resource became foundation for SAP's MDM till version 5.5 and that is why some people didn't consider it as a full MDM but a PIM. Newer versions 7.x are better equipped to provide full MDM capabilities. Although adoption of SAP MDM was some what slow but we will have to see whether it will make any difference in its new version or before that SOA story itself will change its direction.

Book - SAP NetWeaver for dummies By Jeffrey Word preview with limited chapters is available on google books.

Role of Datanetworks, Datawarehouse & Datamart in MDM

2009-08-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

Managing master data was one of the most difficult tasks for organizations. There are ways to solve this problem but tools can help managing master data across organization. Some of the tools are data networks, data warehouses, data marts and an operational data store. Now a days almost all vendors are offering tools for master data management. Here I will throw some light on few types of tools, what they are? what they provide etc.

Data networks
Data networks facilitate in transmission of data within an organization. They provide information transfer and storage facility. A common server can have data which can be used by different departments or even group companies of a corporate. With data networks it is possible to gather master data from various sources. Obviously this will require consolidation and management. Another function data networks provide is sharing of important business information which is used daily transactions.

Data warehouses
Provide storage for the master data. Data can be analyzed and reported through it. Along with storage of data they also provide processes for the retrieval, analysis and management of data for proper access. Since they use common data model and they are optimized for data retrieval they facilitate easy analysis and reporting. This way source system (involved in transactions are relieved of this task and can work efficiently without degrading performance of source systems. Datawarehouses provide long storage of data which may not be possible in transactional db systems.

Data Mart
Although data marts can exist independently but often they are consolidated to dorm a datawarehouse. In some cases subsets of data is extracted to create data mart. Generally data marts are subset of datawarhouse. More specific data (related to a particular aspect) is kept in data mart. Individual departments or group of users use data marts to access data related to their business requirements. Since they are focused on specific information, frequently used data access from data marts is easy.

Transactional Databases
They store real time transactioal data.

MDM - Styles to manage master list

2009-08-03T23:15:00.000-07:00

There are different sets of data in an organization like product information, customer data and location data. Any MDM product or solution may use various hubs to manage these sets of data. The hubs can manage their data in any of the approach (I have explained in my previous post -one copy, multiple copies etc). Here I am putting some more thoughts on styles of master data management:-

Single Copy Master (Central Hub)- A single database for master data with all the information required for applications use it. After linking and matching data is consolidated at a central hub and published to various data sources. Central Hub prevents duplication. Currently running application may require changes to use master data.

Many Copies one Look-up Service- Master data is maintained within user application databases. The central hub stores lists of keys. These keys are used to access attributes for a an entity and these attributes are linked to databases. To access master data, data is located, a query is distributed among various databases, and a list of the requested data is formed on the fly.
This style doesn't require many changes in existing systems but in case of huge databases and addition of more and more databases this can become too complex for efficient access of data. Another issue I have already mentioned in my previous post is chances of duplicates in various systems. With addition of new databases queries may require changes.

Mixed style- Mix of both the styles. Master data is kept on the native databases, keys and Ids are generated to access this data. Some of its important attributes are replicated to the central hub. Central hub can service the common requests, and queries are distributed among various native databases specific attributes (which are generally not frequently used). This improves efficiency of data access at the same time requires less changes in the applications. Update of replica may have issues in this style. Identification of attributes, standardizing format can be a challenging task.

MDM - Approaches to maintain a Master List

2009-08-02T02:29:00.000-07:00

There are many ways to maintain master data. Specially when it comes to maintain master data in an existing system where there are number of applications ad they have their own data along with copy of master. I am trying to summarize various options to maintain master list here. In my future posts I will again revisit approaches.

Only one copy of master— Single master data. Every change is directly made to the master data. Change in user of master data applications is required to use new data. Benefit of this is that you have consistency but it is not always practical.

Many copies, one maintenance— Master data added to the single copy and changes sent to the systems where copies are stored locally. These applications can change the data which is not part of master. Benefit if this is that it requires minimal in the applications.

Merging Master — Applications can change their their copy of the master data. Changes sent to the master where changes are merged into master. These changes are sent back to source systems to update local copies. Benefit of this approach is minimal changes in the source systems. There can be issues like:- Conflicts of same update by two systems, adding a new item in one system where other system already have that item will require remerge. Matching process to avoid duplicates in the master

Oracle Master Data Management Suite

2009-08-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

MDM is essential for success of SOA. It requires tools to achieve its goal of single, standard, common view of master data. Almost all the vendors are offering MDM tools and software. Let us see what Oracle is offering in this space

Oracle Customer Hub
Customer data integration (CDI) solution. It provides following:
A prebuilt extensible global master data model for customer information
Services to maintain customer data across various systems and processes
Capabilities to acquire, synchronize, and federate data
Change and audit controls for data governance

Oracle Product Hub
To centralize all product information from heterogeneous systems. It provides:-
Import workbench for improved data quality
External transaction views.
Mass maintenance capabilities to manage updates to multiple products
Product sales configurations for manufacturing and service industries
Change control capabilities
Rich user interfaces for unstructured content management
Predefined operational attributes with unlimited extensibility

Oracle Site Hub
It is a location mastering solution. It provides:-
A prebuilt extensible data model (site master).
Unlimited number of predefined and user-defined attributes for consolidating site-specific information
Manages updates to multiple sites
Site mapping and view using Google Maps®
Prebuilt integration with Oracle Inventory, Oracle Property Manager, and Oracle Enterprise Asset Management.
Web services to share data and integration with various systems.

Hiperion data relationship management
Previously known as Hyperion Master Data Management. To build consistency within master data assets. According to Oracle website "it provides the industry's first data model-agnostic master data management solution built to enable financial and analytical master data management in dynamic, fast-changing business environments".

For more information please visit Oracle Website:- http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/master-data-management/index.htm

Note: Sorry for some inconvenience caused due to upgrades in the blog. completesoa has undergone some look and feel changes due to which postings were not available. I had to do lots of correction because complete overhauling was required so older posts were also edited to have consistence look and feel. Now I have released all the posts and Post of 1st August. I hope you will like this new look and feel.

Is SOA still alive?

2009-07-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

More then six months back Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group started a debate after posting on blog "Is SOA dead?". A long debate on it started and some supported her views some opposed. Now it is time to confirm whether SOA is still alive or dead/going to die...

On 5th January 2009 Anne wrote on her blog "SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”.

Most important thing Anne mentioned was "SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”. I firmly believe in this statement "SOA is survived by its offspring..." If vendors would have nothing to sale (BPM etc) it would have died much earlier.

At that time in response to Anne's post Eric Roch wrote in his blog: "The vendors have milked the SOA term for all its worth but we still have all the work at hand. We need to get on with building solutions regardless of what we call the technology."

Which I fully agree with and I have posted so many times in this blog too- How vendors were only interested in making money. Now vendors have some thing else to sale- Cloud Computing, Virtualization etc and research organizations also make their bread and butter by promoting vendor's agenda of creating new hype so that money can be made by creating new things in the name of technology to sale.

I will not discuss about all of her post and what was her stand, what was the justification because I have already posted my views months back. Now it is time to validate the things. Debate is required is some thing is going to happen in future but when you have reached to a future point there is no need to have debate but to test the results.

Now key questions are:
1. How many projects failed or abandoned during last six months?
2. Are vendors still going door to door to sale SOA? (They are the best parameters of what people are ready to buy)
3. Are CIO's, CEO's still ready to invest in SOA?
4. Is SOA adoption increasing or decreasing?
5. Are people getting or started getting benefits of SOA?

I have asked this questions to some of the very senior people and senior architects of some organizations to get a feeler. As soon as I will get the views / inputs and feedback I will consolidate and put in my blog.

I invite all of you to share your thoughts on it.

SOA Security Part 3

2009-07-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

Long time back I wrote about SOA security and promised to come back. Now in few of my coming posts whenever I will get some time I will share some information on SOA security. What can be the approach for SOA security this question comes to mind of every security architect? I am trying to put some information here on SOA security approach.

Approach to SOA security

Security access policy
Policy for protecting access for services at any SOA layer.
Policy for entitlement management and authorization.

Message level security
Message encryption, digital signature, authentication, identity propagation.
WS* standards for webservices security.

Security as a service
Security logic should not be implemented in applications. There should be centralized security policy management. Security should be available as a reusable service.

Security tools and technology
Security architecture should provide for integration with SSO, existing infrastructure and legacy applications, identity & access management tools.
There are tools developed by various vendors for SOA security which provide solutions for Entitlement and Management (centralized policy management, policy enforcement in a distributed environment.

SOA Governance
SOA governance plays key role in creating security road-map, policy definition and standardization.

Functions of a security system

* Identity management
* Authentication and authorization
* Message protection cryptography (encryption and signatures) and data privacy
* Security policies enforcement and decision
* Compliance with security policies
* Auditing

Standards related to SOA

2009-07-19T12:57:00.000-07:00

There are many standards related to SOA or SOA related technology but due to various organizations, consortium are working on standards it becomes hard for people to know which standard to follow and interoperability issues are still not addressed. OASIS, WS-I and W3C are the three prominent consortium. These standards are at different stages of their maturity.
People were always complaining about confusion in SOA space. Confusion is often created because lack of standards and standard bodies. Here I am trying to put standards which various organizations have been trying to create or created for SOA or for technologies related to SOA:-

http://www.oasis-opencsa.org
Service Component Architecture (SCA)

http://www.osoa.org
Service Component Architecture Specifications

http://www.soa-standards.org/
The on-going IEEE SOA standardization efforts:

1. IEEE SOA Solution Reference Architecture (SOA-SRA)
2. IEEE SOA Services Composition Protocols (SOA-SCP)
3. IEEE SOA Services Discovery Language (federated discovery) (SOA-SDL)
4. IEEE SOA Requirements Model (SOA-RM)
5. IEEE SOA Adaptive Services Invocation Model (SOA-ASIM)
6. IEEE SOA Relationship Modeling Language (SOA-RML)
7. IEEE SOA Services Ecosystem Exchange Protocols (SOA-SEEP)
8. IEEE SOA Services Integration Protocol (SOA-SIP)
9. IEEE SOA Service-Oriented Enterprise Project Management Model (SOA-PM)
10. IEEE SOA Proactive Event Services Model (SOA-PESM)
11. IEEE SOA for Manufacturing Execution System (SOA4MES)

http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/br_pm_spec_catalog.htm
Catalog of OMG Business Strategy, Business Rules and Business Process Management Specifications

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsbpel
WS-BPEL specification group

http://www.jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr208/index.html
Java Business Integration (JBI)

http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/
WS-* specifications for webservices security, transactions etc

http://www.ws-i.org
WS-I specifications for interoperability. According to ws-i website: "WS-I’s deliverable provide resources for Web services developers to create interoperable Web services and verify that their results are compliant with WS-I guidelines. Key WS-I deliverable include Profiles, Sample Applications and Testing Tools". They provide Profiles, Sample Applications, Testing Tools. Matrix of deliverable is available on their website at: http://www.ws-i.org/deliverables/matrix.aspx

Some interesting resources listing web services standards:

1. Poster of standards related to webservices (from innoq website. This is little bit older but still interesting)
http://www.innoq.com/soa/ws-standards/poster/
Pfd download- http://www.innoq.com/soa/ws-standards/poster/innoQ WS-Standards Poster 2007-02.pdf
2. Webservices specifications index page (from msdn wensite)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms951274.aspx
3. Standards and wenservicesc(from IBM website)
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/standards/
4. List of webservices standards (from wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_service_specifications

SOA Books - Free eBooks

2009-06-01T21:12:00.000-07:00

There are so many books available in the market on SOA. Lots of stuff has been written on internet (blogs, articles, white papers). Some people have given a shape to their ideas and providing them as eBooks for SOA. I have tried putting all this information at one place. In future I will also try to write review of these SOA books

Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design
Author: Thomas Erl
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
URL: http://www.free-ebooks-download.org/free-ebook/dotnet/WebServices/service_oriented_architecture_SOA_concepts_technology_and_design.php

Service Oriented Architecture SOA For Dummies
Author: Judith Hurwitz
Publisher: For Dummies
URL: http://www.free-ebooks-download.org/free-ebook/dotnet/WebServices/service_oriented_architecture%20SOA%20For%20Dummies.php

Enterprise SOA Adoption Strategies
Author: Steve Jones
URL: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/enterprise-soa
Additional Info: You need to login first then you will see the download link

Service Oriented Architecture - Getting It Right
Author: David Besemer, Paul Butterworth, Luc Clément, Jim Green, Hemant Ramachandra, Jeff Schneider, Hub Vandervoort
Additional Info: You need to register first to download this book

Key Strategies for SOA Testing
Author: David Linthicum and Jim Murphy
Additional Info: Registration required

FREE SOA Adoption for Dummies eBook
Aurhor: Miko Matsumura, Bjoern Brauel, Jignesh Shah
URL: http://www.softwareag.com/Corporate/res/books/soa_adoption_for_dummies/default.asp
Additional Info: Registration required

SOA eBook: Patterns, Mashups, Governance, Service Modeling, and More
Aurhor:
URL: http://www.informit.com/promotions/promotion.aspx?promo=136310
Additional Info: Need to submit email ID

Open Source SOA
Author: Jeff Devic
URL: http://www.freebooksclub.net/service-oriented-architecture/6048-open-source-soa-1933988541.html
Additional Info: This URL doesn't work. It redirects to some other page from where it gives link to rapid share. I don't think it is a legal download. Still I am not sure. I will not advice to directly download unless you have understood all the facts.

The new language of business: SOA & Web 2
URL: http://www.ebooks-space.com/ebook/485/The%20New%20Language%20of%20Business:%20SOA%20and%20Web%202.0.html
Additional Info: It also redirects to rapid share. I will not advice. I am not sure whether it is legal or not.

Following ebooks are listed on free ebook websites but for download you will be redirected to Rapid Share. I am not sure whether they are legal or not and whether they are really available on rapid share for download

Oracle SOA Suite Developer's Guide
Implementing SOA : Total Architecture in Practice Ebook
Service Oriented Architecture Concepts Technology and Design Ebook
SOA Approach to Integration Ebook

URL: http://www.ebookpdf.net and others

SOA Approaches - Top down vs Bottom up

2009-05-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

What should be the approach of taking a SOA implementation? Top down or Bottom up. Should be start from scratch which some book worm believe is true or in practice there is any answer to this question - "What should I do of my existing assets? Should throw away them and start a new SOA project from scratch? These are the questions I will try to answer from an architects view point (obviously not from a vendor view point)...

There are two approaches to execute SOA top down and bottom up.

Top down

Also known as green field. This approach is best suited when you are going to implement a new system. Following are some of the activities or steps involved-

Identify broad business domains and their relationship
Identify business process running or required to run the system. Also identify where they with with others (processes, roles etc)
Identify high level services required to run these processes based on process activities
Analyze as is system for identify processes implemented to map them with desired system and processes required to know gap.
Make a strategy to fill the gaps by enabling missing processes in new system.
Other steps are as usual steps of SOA life cycle and project life cycle which I am not covering here in detail.

Benefits of this approach

Helps in scope definition.
Capturing of business rules at a high level.
Better understand the business context
Dependencies can be identified earlier at higher level
Interactions between various actors.
Complexity within the enterprise in terms of message exchange patterns is known earlier.

This was business process driven flavor of top down approach. There is another variance of Top down approach - use case driven.

Bottom up

Generally this approach is taken for modernization of legacy systems or non SOA systems to SOA eco-system.
Following are some activities involved-

Analysis of applications at enterprise level
Build buy reuse analysis
Analysis for redundancy and re-factoring effort
Identification of coarse grained services and creating interfaces/facade on top of old functionality.
Enabling these facade as services.

This approach not necessarily require business process approach (identification of processes, modeling them and then using services to implement those processes).

SOA product comparison resources

2009-04-01T23:30:00.000-07:00

I was trying to find out whether some one has done comparison of SOA tools and products in past or not. I wanted to share my thoughts comparing SOA products but I found people have already done it for you. Still I will do some homework and will come back with my comparison till then enjoy these resources on internet for SOA product comparison

Current Analysis
http://www.currentanalysis.com/p/BusApp-abstracts/AppInfra-SOA.htm

ENTERPRISE SERVICE BUS: PRODUCT EVALUATION COMPARISONS
http://dts.utah.gov/techresearch/researchservices/researchanalysis/resources/esbCompare061018.pdf

MyArch Solutions
http://myarch.com/comparison-of-soa-suites

Network Computing
http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/appinfrastructure/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CKJYQ2X3W1HY0QSNDBECKICCJUMEKJVN?articleID=181501276

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2009-03-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

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SOA Websites & Blogs

2009-03-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

I know this is not a simple job because SOA is such a hot topic that everyday a new website focused on SOA comes into the picture. I am trying to list some good websites focused on SOA. First I will make a list and later will update it to make it sorted based on quality of the site. I know I will have to update it several times but I want to do that and I am doing that:-

The SOA Magazine
http://www.soamag.com/
Not content rich. SOA certification information, courses are listed there.
1/10

SOA World Magazine
http://soa.sys-con.com/
Lots of information. Stories, news, articles, whitepapers.
7/10

The SOA Network
http://www.soanetwork.net/SOA_Book_Network.html

What is SOA?
http://www.whatissoa.com/
Good (systematic) collection of SOA related stuff. But I didn't see lots of happening - updates, news, thoughts there. For some time I thought I am reading a book (SOA design patterns :) hahaha)
7/10

Zapthink
http://www.zapthink.com
Lots of material, information.
6/10

SOA Patterns dot ORG
http://www.soapatterns.org/
Community site for collaboration in pattern identification and development. Launched after release of book SOA design patterns.

eBizQ
http://www.ebizq.net
Good stuff but it is not only for SOA so less marks.
5/10

Content is there but I didn't like the way they have put standards page. I was hardly able to understand whether there are SOA standards discussed in that page.
4/10

The Server Side
http://www.theserverside.com

SOA Center
http://www.soacenter.com
Content is there. It can be better.
6/10

SOA Consortium
http://www.soa-consortium.org
Lack of original in depth content. Lots of podcasts though. Blog is better.
5/10

TechTargets Search SOA sub website
http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/

WEBSERVICES.ORG
http://www.webservices.org
Lots of content on SOA. Interesting site
5/10

SOA Social
http://soasocial.com
Lots of good blogs.
4/10

InfoQ
http://www.infoq.com/
Good stuff
5/10

I have not included vendors websites like IBM, Microsoft, JBoss, Oracle, Software AG etc etc because they deal in other areas too not dedicated to SOA (obviously it should not be a disqualification ). Still I accept they have lots of content on their sites (IBM guys are champion in writing technical content whether it is white paper or article or blog)
I will revisit all this stuff and will also request visitors to rate them so that I can reorder this content. Right now it is not in any specific order. Blogs I will update later here. I know there are lots of websites there.

Update 1

Blogs
http://blogs.oracle.com/woa/
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/the-soa-blog
http://blogs.progress.com/soa_infrastructure/
http://orasoa.blogspot.com/

it.toolbox.com/blogs/the-soa-blog
http://clemensblog.blogspot.com/
http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/
http://www.thesoablog.com/
http://biemond.blogspot.com/
http://abhishek-oracleaia-bpel-esb.blogspot.com/
http://soa-blog.net/

Open Source SOA Tools

2009-03-01T22:18:00.000-08:00

For a long time I have been advocating open source and making SOA independent of vendor specific technology. For a long time SOA was only thought to be implemented using costly commercial products. During last few years open source products have come and they are becoming mature day by day. In this post and in my future posts too I will try to discuss what is there in open source for SOA? Whether SOA can be implemented using open source? What is the maturity of open source SOA tools.

JBoss Suite
http://jboss.org/

JBoss has been one of the leader in open source. They have come up with JBoss ESB, jBPM (Business Process Modeling) (community as well as support subscription) additions.
Other products of JBoss suite include - JBoss Rules, Hibernate, Seam etc
JBoss Enterprise Middleware for SOA is enterprise edition (subscription based)

See what is the different between community driven and JEMS: http://www.jboss.com/products/community-enterprise/
Community site: http://jboss.org/

Fuse Community
http://fusesource.com/

ESB (based on ServiceMix)
Message Broker (based on ActiveMQ)
Services Framework (based on CXF)
Mediation Router (based on Camel)

Mule Source
http://www.mulesource.org/ (community)
http://www.mulesource.com/ (enterprise)

ESB
Mule Galaxy - SOA governance platform often reffered to as registry/repository

WSO2
http://wso2.com/

Products are listed here: http://wso2.com/products/
Enterprise Service Bus
Web Services Framework
Data Services Server
Web Services Application Server

There are open source products offered by various communities :-
OpenESB, Apache Camel, Apache Synapes, Blackbird ESB, ChainBuilder ESB, Jitterbit, Openadapter, PEtALS ESB, Openlink Virtuoso, ServiceMix

I will post comparison of open source tools for SOA in my coming posts

SOA Design Patterns

2009-02-27T09:42:00.000-08:00

Service orientation involves distributed systems collaborating, sharing information and so on. This specific nature of service oriented architecture puts new challenges to architects and system designers. As Object Oriented paradigm people have identified solutions to recurring problems in the form of design patterns, similarly in Service Oriented world attempts are focused to identify solutions to recurring problems in the form of SOA design patterns.

Recently Prentice Hall has announced the publication of "SOA Design Patterns", There are 85 design patterns mentioned in the book. Whith release of the book, the new SOAPatterns.org community site has been launched. This site will provide a forum for further development and refinement of SOA design patterns.
Contributors included David Chappell and Clemens Utschig from Oracle, Mark Little from Red Hat, and Jason Hogg from Microsoft. Furthermore, Dennis Wisnosky, Chief Architect and Chief Technical Officer at the U.S. Department of Defense.

The 85 patterns identified in the book include: Canonical Schema Bus, Composition Design Patterns, Enterprise Service Bus, Inventory Design Patterns, Policy Enforcement, Reliable Messaging, Service Design Patterns, Service Grid, Three-Layer Inventory, and Transformation.

Web site soapatterns.org has listed patterns which can be sorted alphabetically or according to category. They have identified following categories to put patterns under them:

Foundational Inventory Patterns, Logical Inventory Layer Patterns, Inventory Centralization Patterns, Inventory Implementation Patterns, Inventory Governance Patterns, Foundational Service Patterns, Service Implementation Patterns, Service Security Patterns, Service Contract Design Patterns, Legacy Encapsulation Patterns, Service Governance Patterns, Capability Composition Patterns, Service Messaging Patterns, Composition Implementation Patterns, Service Interaction Security Patterns, Transformation Patterns, Common Compound Design Patterns

More information related to SOA design patterns:

SOA Patterns - A community site for SOA design patterns.
http://www.soapatterns.org/

Tony Cook discusses SOA patterns mentioned by Gartenenr.
http://schneider.blogspot.com/2008/06/gartner-soa-design-patterns.html

Some patterns discussed at IBM site
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-soi/

MSDN Site
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms954638.aspx

Will SOA die?

2009-01-31T13:02:00.000-08:00

This month Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group posted in her blog: "SOA is dead; Long live services" (http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2009/01/soa-is-dead-long-live-services.html)

I thought I should keep watching what others are saying. I had so much to say because the pain I had and I was showing through many of my posts in past was realized and accepted by Anne but I thought I should see what others are saying.

Later Curt Cagle on Oreilly blog posted his views: "No doubt that SOA vendors will continue to try to prop up their particular dead parrot for a while, even as businesses axe SOA project after SOA project as being complex, unworkable and too fragile - just as no doubt, there will be those (few) business projects that will be held up as being successful because they happened to hit the (small) sweet spot where SOA as a model actually works reasonably well, but I for one am just as happy to see this rather ripe smelling bird now pushing up the daisies".
(http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/soa-is-dead-its-about-time.html)

Then wrote Eric Roch: "The vendors have milked the SOA term for all its worth but we still have all the work at hand. We need to get on with building solutions regardless of what we call the technology".

This is the point I have been making for a long time and was waiting for some one to confirm it. Vendors have been milking any technology for their benefit. If it is a new idea it should not be done without their tools, costly software and way of working. If you want to do something without their tools they don't accept it standard, worthy and useful. Often CIO's CEO's CTO's are cheated by these people who sale products which are not even required for a particular environment. It happens in government organizations also. Why people become victims of these vendors?

SOA was a way to make systems work together, reuse existing assets of any organization and put discipline in the process by governance but big dreams were sold in the name of new technology, people started advocating doing everything from scratch for making it SOA. Green field approach, do it process oriented, eliminate what you have and buy costly products and implement SOA everywhere. Now since products were being sold so to justify the investment big promises were made in the name of high ROI, faster time to market etc. Now question is whether high ROI is achieved? :). I know people will hardly accept it but those who were unable to run simple projects are expected to re-engineer whole organization, process successfully when this giant (SOA) has been really made a giant by people. People started doing it big-bang.

There were and still are problems which are not solved for example standards for webservices itself. People opened up an infinite scope of adjusting anything :- Any protocol, any technology, not only webservices etc etc. But how to sole interoperability? How to solve federated transaction and security issues? Are you all agree on something so that it can work? No answer.

Nothing was written from ground up for SOA. Just a wrapper on top of what ever is existing and sale it. No body was seriously interested in doing something which is suitable for SOA. Same old RPC to communicate. Whether it is traditional webservice or a message queue as writes Curt Cagle: "Purists may argue that over time the SOA model (especially the SOAP/WSDL model) had been moving towards a more messaging-oriented architecture, but I'd counter that all that a messaging queue does is to decouple the receipt of the message from the response - if the message processor invokes a service, it is still an RPC, especially when transactions are involved"

Time will prove whether SOA will survive or not but basic concept behind SOA were good and helpful if people would have left it as an architecture style rather than technology, hype and way to sale their products.

SOA Certification

2008-12-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

Very few people are aware that there are certifications available for SOA professionals. Whether these certificates are useful or not? One should go for them or not? I am not saying yes to these questions. In fact I will say no. But still for the benefit of the readers I am listing some information related to SOA certifications:-

IBM SOA Certifications
IBM has three types of certifications related to SOA

SOA Software Group certifications

IBM Certified SOA Associate [2008]

According to IBM website this test is for : This entry level certification is intended for individuals who work on SOA projects, such as architects, technical sales people, sales people, administrators, application developers, business analysts, project managers, system integrators, business integrators, managers, project sponsors and others.

IBM Certified SOA Solution Designer [2007]

According to IBM web site : This intermediate level certification is intended for solution designers, or consultants and architects with previous experience designing SOA application components and business integration solutions. They are part of project teams responsible for designing SOA solutions.

SOA Software Group Platform

IBM Certified Administrator for SOA Solutions - WebSphere Process Server V6.1

According to IBM web site : This intermediate level certification is intended for system administrators that perform the installation, configuration and day-to-day tasks associated with ensuring the smooth and efficient operation of the WebSphere Process Server runtime environment. This includes product installation, configuration and deployment of business processes and adapters, connecting to back-end resources and basic troubleshooting. These individuals tune the WebSphere Process Server runtime environment with respect to resource utilization, scaling, clustering and load balancing as appropriate.

According to IBM website they will remain with these existing tests for year 2009.

More info on IBM website:- http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/certs/soa_index.shtml

BEA (Now Oracle) SOA Certification

Oracle SOA Architect Certified Expert

According to Oracle website:- The SOA Enterprise Architecture candidate understands both technical and organizational issues and how to deal with conflict between the two using best practices, design principles, and industry-standard organizational models. A SOA Enterprise Architecture Certification designation demonstrates a high level of expertise in applying the Oracle SOA Domain Model and Reference Architecture to enterprise-scale scenarios.

Education website of Oracle has some online courses for SOA:
SOA: Architectural Concepts and Design Principles (BEA)
SOA: Architectural Concepts of Service Infrastructure (BEA)
SOA: Architectural Concepts of Service Design (BEA)
Organization, Planning & Architectural Considerations for SOA (BEA)
SOA: Architectural Concepts of Service Infrastructure - LVC (BEA)
Organization, Planning & Architectural Considerations for SOA - RWS (BEA)

They offer-Instructor Led Training, Live Virtual Class, Private Events
More information on Oracle education website:-
About Exam - http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=284
About courses - http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getSearchResults

Others
Zapthink (http://www.zapthink.com/lza.html)

SOA Testing Tools

2008-11-01T22:35:00.000-07:00

AS I discussed in one of my post that testing tools are very important for successful SOA testing, I am going to share some of the tools here in this post. Now a days lots of vendors are coming up with new set of testing tools/suites equipped with SOA testing

Mercury
Quick test, Service test, Load runner & Quality center. All of these together presented as a SOA testing solution. These cater for functional, regression test automation and performance testing.
Acquisition of Systinet Corp has added SOA specific test capability in Mercury test suite.

Parasoft SOAtest
Automated webservices testing tool. WSDL validation, unit and functional testing, performance testing are main capabilities of this product. Addresses interoperability, security, scalability and change management issues of SOA.

Green Hat GH Tester
Tool for message based systems. Supports protocols like JMS, SOAP. Product supported by it include SONIC MQ, TIBCO RV.

AdventNet QEngine
Web-based test automation tool. Supported on multiple platform (built using Java). Caters functional, performance testing of web applications and web services.

Borlad SilkPerformer SOA edition
Tool for testing Webservices. It supports functional testing and performance testing.

SOAP UI
Open source desktop application which can be used for inspecting, invocation and developing webservices over HTTP. Functional, Load and Compliance testing are supported by this tool.
Maturity of this tool needs to be taken care and evaluated as per specific organization SOA requirements.

PushToTest TESTMAKER
Open source framework to build test agents to check web applications for scalability, functionality and performance. Agents mimic user behavior.

SOA Testing

2008-10-01T16:27:00.000-07:00

Due to specific nature of SOA eco-system it requires a new model methodology and thinking for testing. Why? SOA services span across boundaries of the organizations, applications are composite of various services across the organization and beyond organization boundary.
For a long time there was a need to have SOA testing model specially designed for SOA but it didn't exist. Here I am trying to put some thoughts on SOA testing.

Challenges in SOA Testing

Some services don't have user interface- they are used by other services from outside of the organization which participate in current services interact and collaborate with out side world beyond organization boundary.
Security testing is utmost important and is a challenging task in such an heterogeneous and uncontrolled environment.

Testing Model

Famous V Model comes into picture here. Test design analysis planning and execution happens throughout the life of SOA project. V model provides for parallel testing activities during project life cycle. Example- Requirement=Prepare UAT, Functional Specs=Create System Service Test, Tech Specs=Create Integration Test, Program Specs=Create Unit Test

Why V model is suitable for SOA projects?

Derived from business context.
Starts from business requirements gathering till acceptance.
It takes top down approach which helps capturing various aspects like processes, security etc.
Various levels of V model map to various phases of project life cycle covering different level of details and various view points e.g. functional view point, integration view point, user view point

Requirement for SOA testing

Detailed understanding of SOA
Tools to cater testing requirements from business domain, security etc.
Business domain knowledge and test teams aligned to domain.

Types of testing for SOA

SOA testing can be categorized in to following
Service component testing
Service testing
Integration testing
Process testing
System level testing
Security testing
Governance testing

I will discuss about these aspects in my coming posts.