Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Can't we just keep it Simple? (Javaworld SOA article)

Check out my latest JEE / SOA article on Javaworld here.

The core premise of the article is the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid!) principle - SOA has definite benefits when applied to some JEE projects, but not to all and developers need to remain wary of "silver bullet" promises made by SOA vendors.

1 comment:

Mahesh Kolari said...

** Simple SOA: ** An application module exposed to external systems via HTTP/HTTPS protocol with a well defined XML schema for IN/OUT parameters will be a classic example of a simplest form of SOA enabled interaction. This will support loose-coupling/Robustness/Interoperability/Reusability/Security requirements at appropriate levels.

** Does the promise of SOA in delivering software reuse live up to reality? **
Yes - It is not only a question of if we can ever reuse all of very old code implementations that are written badly. It's also about how well we can implement the newer application applications to make them more reusable. SOA enables us to reuse 10%-25% of the legacy interfaces. With refactoring it should be possible to SOA enable another 20% of those interfaces. There are lot of projects going on where SOA is used for migrating from Client-server architecture to a Thin-client (Web based) architecture. Underlying business object implementations (C/C++, Java, COBOL etc.) are reused by building a bridge using Tuxedo/Jolt, Messaging frameworks/products or Webservice.

-Mahesh Kolari