Although I missed the first day of the The ServerSide Symposium as I was en route to Las Vegas from London, many of the talks have been interesting. I am currently listening to Ted Farrell from Oracle who is discussing Oracle's core J2EE interests that focus primarily on EJB 3.0 and Java Server Faces. JSF has many interesting correlations between style sheet manipulation and more course faces components employed in web application developments.
John Crupi's discussion on Sun Microsystems position on SOA was also of interest, although focused more on the wider integration challenges. The movement of SOA as 'Moving from monolithic, closed applications to shared, network-based layered services' is a very useful basis for a lot of the SOA chatter active today. The SOA definition is also worth a look: 'An integration architectural style for XML document-based exchanges using shared, loosely coupled network based software services.'
In many respects I agree with this; however in other respects it is one of many definitions of SOA depending on your perspective. His discussion as to where SOA is today was insightful, and certainly throws up the opportunity for XQuery to play it's role in evolution. The following is a snap shot of this slide: SOA Usage
| Document data interchange Basic Web Services | Typical use today... |
| Business Integration Services B2B Services | Emerging and Merging |
| Realtime Discovered Services | Sun's Vision of the SOA future |
Cruppi's view that we need fast success in SOA projects is important. Any approach to SOA has to be use a fine grained piece-wise approach.
Looking athe SOA big rules, it is interesting to list the core architectural rules that govern an inclusive SOA framework.
- Coarse grained Business Services
- Document-based - XML documents are no first class citizens
- Mostly Asynchroniious
- Conversation
- Reliable
- Secure/Identity - This is major headache in any SOA solution. Federated identity (in particular, the Liberty foundation which is an industry neutral federated single-sign-on process.
- Policy Driven
- WSDL
- BPEL Orchestration - Cruppi identified as this standard as primed to establish itself this year.
- JBI Focused - JSR-208 is the next generation integration description that extends J2EE into the world of SOA architecture. As an integration container for Java, it will likely become the focal point for SOA architectures that use the Java and J2EE platforms.
The JBI JSR looks very interesting, so I'll blog about this soon. Particularly interesting is how it binds SOAP, FTP, REST and abMS using a message router and then engages BPEL Routing, Transformations and Correlations to service Service Engines. This JSR is due to be published next week, so I'll discuss it then. More blogging from the ServerSide Symposium later today.