Tag: SOA

Is EJB dead in times of SOA?

In times of lightweight containers and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) is not the predominant development model anymore. Instead multiple technologies and frameworks are competing to be THE service development model of the future. For instance SCA, Spring, Axis, CXF and …

… probably EJB?

The Jbi4Ejb Binding Component allows to integrate Stateless Session EJBs into an ESB infrastructure, thus making them available to service consumers.

This is again a nice example of how open standards such as JBI help to protect the investments of the past.

SOA without BPM without SOA

Some people argue that SOA and BPM are two different things. That is probably right because it is possible to create a service landscape without having a business process representation. But if you look at the main reason for establishing a service oriented architecture the perspective changes.
The main reason for SOA is business agility. Every technology that helps to achieve that goal is welcome to be integrated in the SOA technology stack.
BPM makes perfect sense as it fosters better aligment on business and IT and helps to shorten development cycles.
Ok understood. But if that is true wouldn’t be be enough to use a BPM only without services? The answer is no because in order to create a flexible BPM solution it must be based on a sound service landscape. If that is not the case changing a business process would require new services to be created or existing to be altered. Sooner or later this would lead to service proliferation which would render the BPM approach useless over time. The result would be anything but hardly an agile system.

My conclusion: Using BPM as part of a SOA makes perfect sense if it is based on reliable and well designed services.

SOA Maturity Model

Quote taken from the website:

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged as the most significant shift in how business applications are designed, developed and implemented in the last 10 years, eclipsing the shift to client-server. In fact, Gartner, Inc. predicts that by 2008, “SOA will provide the basis for 80 percent of new development projects.”

While IT is quick to embrace the technical value of service-oriented design, development and implementation, IT executives face the very different challenge of accurately managing the investment in technology as it relates to business value. These IT managers and decision makers need help and guidance in communicating the business value of their SOA vision and to be able to benchmark their SOA adoption within the organization.

To address this challenge, Sonic Software and its partners AmberPoint, BearingPoint and Systinet have jointly developed A New SOA Maturity Model (SOA MM). The model is designed to show the increasingly positive impact of SOA adoption from a business benefits perspective. It provides IT decision makers with simple framework for benchmarking the strategic value of their SOA implementation, and a model for visualizing future success.

For me the SOA maturity model is very useful in order to discuss the SOA strategy for a company. The Quick Reference visualizes different maturity levels and helps the company to get an idea where they are standing.