I agree with Todd- I call these things "integration-ready applications." Basically IMO an application should be a service + a human UI. With AJAX, its of course now possible to do the entire human UI bit on the browser only and not have a presentation layer on the server at all. That's how we write all of our management consoles (applications) for WSO2 products- a set of services + an AJAX UI.
The advantage of course is that the "application" can immediately be integrated (aka mashed up) with other services to create new services and applications without having to screen scrape or do any such ugly reverse engineering work. Sanjiva. Todd Biske wrote: > I don't think it's a meaningless phrase. I actually think it's > extremely important to evaluate how well third party products, > whether purchased via a hosted or shrink-wrapped model, play within > an enterprise's SOA. While I'll admit that it can be very > integration-centric, it should be a red flag if a company can't > adequately describe their solutions in terms of the services they > provide and how they contribute to their customer's SOA. Simply > stating they have web services or REST interfaces doesn't cut it > though. I'm much more interested in the functions the services > provide than necessarily how they're exposed. > > Take, for example, something like SAP. Merely stating that thousands > of APIs are now available as Web Services really doesn't mean much > from an SOA adoption standpoint. Yes, it may be an indicator of > reduction integration costs, but in terms of the impact to an SOA > effort, you have to ask the question on whether the functional > decomposition chosen by SAP matches the business domain models of the > enterprise. Coming back to my horizontal versus vertical theme (see: > http://www.biske.com/blog/?p=186), if the things the enterprise wants > as "horizontal" doesn't match up with things SAP has made > "horizontal," the effort will be painful. If the vendor can't even > provide a view that allows you to perform this type of evaluation, > you'd have to ask whether or not they really understand the business > domains in which their products participate. It's probably far more > likely that the enterprises don't have the proper models and > resources to do the evaluation, and therefore get stuck with whatever > the vendors provided. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but > it's basically anyone's guess, because the enterprise hasn't done the > work to make good decisions. > > -tb > > On Jun 27, 2007, at 10:30 AM, Teresa Jones wrote: > >> I'm currently looking at a CRM product that the vendor claims is >> 'SOA-compliant' yet it is also claimed to be an n-tier architecture. A >> quick search on the concept of SOA-compliance brought up this >> article:- >> http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/engineering/archives/my-soa- >> compliant-toaster-and-cell-phone-7362 >> which was quite fun! >> I suspect that the CRM vendor concerned actually means that you can >> integrate with it using web services.... >> Question for the group - can an application be regarded as >> SOA-compliant? Or is that rather a meaningless phrase? >> thanks >> Teresa >> >> >> >> >> Yahoo! Groups Links >> >> >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> > > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > -- Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D. Founder & Director; Lanka Software Foundation; http://www.opensource.lk/ Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.; http://www.wso2.com/ Director; Open Source Initiative; http://www.opensource.org/ Member; Apache Software Foundation; http://www.apache.org/ Visiting Lecturer; University of Moratuwa; http://www.cse.mrt.ac.lk/
