Check out this article from Computing. It is apparent good advice for SOA implementation but as mentioned in my previous post, something has been forgotten – some enterprises provide software as a web app that is their product and revenue generator. This software could be rendered into services behind the firewall, yet is not about business processes and must be treated differently.
A quote from the article:
Mistake No. 3: Leaving SOA to the techies
When the SOA process is left mostly with the IT side of the organisation, services risk being designed to optimise software performance and reliability, but may not fully reflect the business requirements.
Clarity of business interfaces is essential for cross-application integration or multi-organisation use.
What about an interface that provides a specific website feature and is a service in it’s own right? Such an interface is unlikely to be exposed across organizations because it provides a business specific feature we do not wish to share with others. Further such an interface probably has few business requirements though the underlying service may need to support auditing or customer tracking tools.
A further quote:
Mistake No. 1: Irrational SOA exuberance
Excessive numbers of services those that cannot be readily matched to the business model of the application are a sign of an SOA environment where applications need to be checked as they are completed.
Such environments may feature repositories full of services, volumes of documentation and an impressive collection of new tools and middleware, but what they will not have is agility, incremental software versioning or reuse.
Again let’s consider a service that provides a website feature such as recommendations. How much does it have to match the business model? One might argue that SOA is only concerned with business processes but surely we can model other things as services?
So what exactly is a service, what is SOA and where does REST fit in? I’ll cover that next….
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