Last week I received my first copy of an Oracle magazine. I have to say that this is an excellent effort for a trade magazine (I used to receive a SAP magazine which was also praiseworthy, to be fair). Obviously the articles were geared towards Oracle's products and technology, but for a technological simpleton like me it still had some interesting stuff. Here is an extract from one on design and SOA:
<< No matter how good they are, development tools alone aren't the whole answer to SOA success. Effective services for the real world require a deft development hand. "Through my involvement in the IEEE SOA activities, I have seen a lot of projects using the SOA concept that were not cost-effective," Davydov observes. "Technologically, the projects were interesting, but they did not produce a single dime for the business." Subpar services may result when developers simply translate component-based CORBA IDL interfaces into SOA's Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces, he says. "Developers sometimes use the CORBA mentality, where they create stringent interfaces and then expose them via Web services. But to match the performance of the legacy applications, they needed more-expensive hardware. It becomes a vicious cycle where you're losing money and not seeing benefits." Fortunately, this cycle can be broken with new thinking about how to approach SOA development. According to experts, six factors are key to SOA success. 1. Understand the Business At Aloha Airlines, SOA-based services provide the foundation for a new generation of customer-centric applications. Burkhart's first SOA-development step is to define key business priorities, including how to better serve customers. To get SOA right, Burkhart confers with his CEO and the heads of various business divisions to hash out what they each need for growing their part of the business. "I make sure I'm involved in the budgeting process of each division, to understand its business needs and business drivers and what it is trying to accomplish," he says. "And from that, I look at what IT functionality we can provide to serve their needs." He then evaluates his technology infrastructure to find its strengths and limitations and creates a technology road map for achieving the organization's business goals. The Aloha Airlines road map called for a wide-scale hardware upgrade from mainframe clients to Web-accessible PCs and a centralized data repository built on Oracle Database 10g. Those improvements created the foundation for a new services-based passenger booking application built with the help of Oracle JDeveloper. The new booking application uses Web services to integrate Aloha Airline's existing program with a back-end reservations system from EDS. Burkhart estimates that the whole project eliminated about US$1 million of costs, with an investment of US$100,000, and the resulting efficiencies are saving the airline $1 million annually. "I look at the savings in terms of hard costs," Burkhart says. "It's always nice to paint a rosy picture of the sales and revenue upsides, but if I can take costs out of the operation, I know that those upsides are just gravy." 2. Look Top-Down and Bottom-Up Before diving into creating services, SOA developers should choose how to make the most of two broad approaches to development. One, the so-called top-down approach, typically applies to building a service from scratch. The second, bottom-up approach works well for extending an existing application to an SOA environment. The top-down method requires thorough analysis of business requirements, often through a close collaboration between the technical and business staff, to properly define what the service will do and then apply the necessary technical elements to it. By contrast, the initial emphasis in the bottom-up method focuses on a "discovery" phase that analyzes existing software assets to find those that would provide the highest potential benefit to a company if they became a widely available service.>> You can find the article at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/05-may/o35design.html Gervas Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
