> <<Best Practices for SOA: Building a Data Services Layer > > If businesses are to have any hope of building flexible services that > offer the performance and agility needed to succeed with SOA, those > businesses must solve the technical challenge of accessing > information that is, data across application platforms and their > organization as a whole.
I disagree. The challenge in an SO approach is *not* to gain access to data within legacy applications. (That would be a data oriented approach--and, as it happens, a typical old-school integration approach). An SO approach would strive to extract and leverage *services* from legacy applications. Or at least capabilities that would be an implementation component of a service implementation. Data access and manipulation would be a by-product of that service- enablement/extraction. In other words, focus on services and doing, not on data. Some may consider such a use of legacy applications to be poor form and make a witty reference to cosmetics and swine, ;-) but IMO such an approach can be both practical and SO "acceptable" when managed properly. -Rob
