The SOA Way...

Ever wondered a repository where you query anything and expect a perfect answer. Well you might think of Google but is it really a repository? It will only be wise to leave the answer for Googlers and move ahead. My current dive into SOA has poised me with some stunning facts and few dazzling question. First was the number of SOA patents that IBM has and how over a period of time it has captured more than 60% of the SOA market leaving no place for other players. Honestly speaking, IBM has well matured with SOA and rendering key services to other industries in embracing this potentially robust architecture.
One of the questions we must surely ask is how the seamless integration achieved at the end between heterogeneous systems? After all, IT systems are the most notorious ones when it comes to talking with each other. Talk about APIs, OO Modelling, UML Design and what not...but all show some kind of loopholes when it comes to establishing cross organizational interaction between the business processes. How does then SOA claims to embark that it supports flexibility and reuseability. The sole power comes from XML which eased the process of data representation in a standard form across the internet industry and soon became a widely embraced standard by all leading IT organizations. The never sleeping IT world quickly grew to web services but it definitely took time for standards to emerge to have a giant and widely accepted IT architecture in place.
It is sheer amazement to browse IBM website for SOA and find tonnes and tonnes of documents explaining the evaluation-standardization-adaptability-governance process related to SOA. It definitely isn't a magic to have 2 applications build by two mutually independent organizations to interact seamlessly and produce consistent results. But it happens through SOA! The simple fact of creating services as stateless and then standardizing the interface that can be used to enable global communication is really the charm of SOA.
The supporting protocols have even seen a dramatic growth over a period of time. Each aspect in the supporting protocols is so fine tuned! You read about XML-RPC to get convinced that this protocol will withstand tomorrow's business needs and then you see SOAP emerging as yet another standard offering some advantage over the previously considered 'sufficient' protocol. The signs are clear that IT is never going to sleep.
Think of declaring the availability of a particular service. The WSDL, UDDI and SOAP coordinate with each other so well to have a unified service directory which not only takes care of services' name, but also the description of what is does and how can that be invoked while contacting service provider.
It truly is a pleasing experience reading what is dominating the industry and I would definitely recommend readers of my blog to invest good time browsing IBM's site to learn more about this fascinating architecture.