| dc.description.abstract | Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is currently viewed as the “silver bullet” solution for all of the integration issues that a business faces in this very competitive world. SOA technologies vendors would also like everyone to believe the “silver bullet” myth. While there is definitely some truth to the notion of SOA being able to solve many integration issues, SOA does not apply to all integration issues and it should not be considered as the only technology solution. The core argument is whether SOA is a technology or a methodology. Most experts will argue that it is a methodology with definite software architecture pattern, but many case studies have shown that it is a complete mindset change, a new ideology as to how software should be created to solve business problems.
This ideology of SOA has been around for decades in many forms and it is coming to fruition as the internet is creating the concept of a global information village. The global information village is giving people the opportunity to enhance communication and find solutions to all sorts of problems eliminating the need to recreate solutions. The idea of reusability is catching up very fast and that’s where SOA is claiming most of it benefits like speed to market and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) for software development.
SOA is definitely not for everyone, especially for environments that are accustomed to legacy technologies and associated software development practices. There is a limited scope for SOA in legacy environments and not all problems can be solved with SOA. For instance if a company already has a monolithic system that is performance oriented and is meeting the needs of the business, then future enhancements will never dictate the need for SOA as the initial investment into SOA is very high. From a performance perspective, a monolithic system will always be faster since network latency due to dispersed and segregated multiple computing engines integration is the nature of SOA. A good application of SOA in the legacy environment would be e-commerce where monolithic system capabilities can be abstracted out and made web enabled. In this approach one does not have to rewrite its monolithic system but only use SOA to define a new interface to interact with the monolithic system. | |
