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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Faster, better SOA

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Product Test and Buyer's Guide




Product Test and Buyer's Guide, 10/23/07

Faster, better SOA

By Julie Bort

Chances are you've already had your hands in a service-oriented-architecture project or two. Of the 11,000 largest enterprises worldwide, 95% are engaged in "some type of effort to implement SOA," says Susan Eustis, president of WinterGreen Research. "Most of these projects have started out as compliance efforts and have been extended to include a dashboard that is used to manage the business. SOA starts out as a small trial initiative before it is expanded."

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With so much work going on, the hype around SOA has eroded. In its place are more than a few startling truths: When it comes to SOA, the network is everything. Not every project is SOA friendly. An often shockingly expensive initial SOA project will pay for itself repeatedly over time, as other projects reuse the stockpile of services -- provided you've made that reuse easy (see "Crazy SOA costs grow sane over time"). In addition, the decades-old .Net/Java split still prevails in the SOA world.

The good news is that SOA has matured enough that the school-of-hard-knocks lessons mostly have been learned, analysts say. "In the last few years, SOA was touted as the next big thing, and then these projects rolled out that were basically Web services," says Kamran Ozair, CTO of MindTree Consulting. "People learned the hard way that this was not the right way to go about it."

Crutchfield began an SOA pilot about two years ago, when it upgraded its mission-critical catalog/call center, e-commerce and retail order-taking applications, which are 90% custom code, Weiskircher says. Proponents of reusable code and objects, and most familiar with Microsoft programming tools, his team opted for a .Net-based services strategy. But they soon realized they had to direct their efforts toward business goals, not technology objectives. "The tenets of software development haven't changed over the years. There is value in reusable code and a consistent requirement for protecting data. There are places where the services-approach works and places where it doesn't," he says.

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Contact the author:
Network World Editor Julie Bort can be reached at: jbort@nww.com

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