SOA still in its puberty, but shows promise
Service-Oriented architecture is quickly becoming the preferred architecture style in almost all industries.
Still,we haven’t really seen all the positive benefits that have been promised during the years of hyping
the concept, and there is still some confusion to what this concept really means.
The SOA workshop gathered around 20 experienced SOA-experts from around the world (most from Europe and the U.S.),
to discuss their practical experiences and current research in the academia on how SOA has materialized itself,
and what we think will be important going forward.
We also published a book with admitted papers from the workshop.
This book is available on request. The PDF-version can be accessed here: SOA Workshop papers.pdf
Although SOA have been hyped for several years, and one would believe that the concepts have been
established for a long time, and powerful tool support are widely available,
it turns out that even the most experienced people and those working actively on concept development
experience “pubertal challenges” around realization of SOA-based solutions.
This is also consistent with our own experience.
In the workshop we got the opportunity to discuss more specifically what these challenges are,
and what needs to be worked on to handle them.
Tools are still immature and increasingly complex, concepts are still under development, even though there is some concensus around the most central concepts. But still, there is great optimism and equally strong faith in being able to achieve the benefits that are being expected.
Admittance to the workshop required a paper reviewed and approved by the organizing committee. We approved 14 papers, some research papers and some practitioner papers. Rumours being spread about the workshop created additional interest in the hallways, so we ended up with about 20 active participants in the workshop. Among the participants were several authors of well known books on SOA-related topics:
- Olaf Zimmermann Recently published a book on “Perspectives on Web Services” through Springer Verlag. Olaf currently works at IBM research and focuses on methodology around architecture/design decisions.
- Bobby Woolf Co-author of “Enterprise Integration Patterns”, already a bible among integration architects
- Nicolai Josuttis - Originally an author of C++ books, but is now looking to SOA. He ran a tutorial on SOA at OOPSLA.
Other members of the workshop also impressed with deep insights and good practical understanding. Michael Hermann from DaimlerChrysler has worked for some time on semantic issues. Through his work with solutions from SAP and IBM he has gained a reflected and practical view on how this should be done. Arne Jørgen Berre from Sintef, Norway is leading a research project within EU on semantic issues.
The workshop adressed the following areas based on the papers admitted:
This workshop was the 4.year it was conducted. Still, we confirmed that it is valuable with these kinds of discussions as SOA is far from being truly established. It is likely that the workshop will run at OOPSLA next year also.
Details on the areas that were discussed can be found by following the links above.
