What is SOA?? What people say...

A nice page I found while looking around to get an idea of what people really mean when they say SOA.

Worth a read!!!

What is SOA?? - A video guide

"What is Service Oriented Architecture"

Beautifully explained in a video on YouTube.

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REST Architecture

What is REST & what I understand by it??

Here is how Dr. Roy Fielding defines it:

“Representational State Transfer is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through an application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use.”

The term was first given to describe a form of web architecture. So in short, REST is a model for building a distributed system.

Webservices & REST

Early webservices were the same as well. It was signified by the lack of integration among the services & difficulties in embedding services from various other sources.

This is where the role of REST comes into picture. REST, in fact is only a architecture. It doesn't bog you down with what underlying technologies to use, but helps you build distributed web applications & services. This way, RESTful webservice came to be known as second generation webservices.

Designing a RESTful webservice involves:

1. Become free of underlying programming semantics. Expose the business implementation as a service. So the consumer will identify the service with a URI, which becomes a representation.
2. This enables the representation to be callable over the HTTP interface.
3. Each representation should have URL links to other representations.
4. The URIs should not show any actions, should be shown like a verb/noun.

Eg. http://www.abc.com/AddItem

And not like,

http://www.abc.com/showPage?Process=Add

5. XML is the format to work on, so design proper schema for representations.

Enterprise Integration Arch vs SOA

EIA architecture is basically designed to integration systems/applications where were in first place not designed to be integrated. EI could be an integration of disparate sytems across organisations. Data redudancy could become a major issue in case of faulty design.

Whereas, SOA is a planned integration approach. The applications are designed so as to act in sync with each other. These avoid redundancy of data due to its planned approach.

Webmethods set to buy Infravio

WebMethods is all set to buy Infravio, a company specializing in Web Services platform, for $38mn. Infravio a 65 member team with 50 members in Chennai, India has moved closer to WebMethods due to its tireless work on SOA.

WebMethods plans to use infravio's flagship product X-Registry, a leading registry/repository platform for governance of SOA products & incorporate into WebMethods fabric.

Off late, WebMethods is picking up various small companies to consolidate its position in SOA based product delivery. The CEO has clearly mentioned this desire while picking up Cerebra & not Infravio.

Will this make WebMethods a leader among the SOA space?? Lets see...

webMethods buys Cerebra Inc

On its course to release v7 of the popular product webMehtods Fabric, webMethods Inc took over a small startup Cerebra Inc. This way wM is moving from its application integration roots to SOA.

Webmethods Fabric's new version will incorporate the semantic metadata management technology with automated discovery capabilities of Cerebra. This way Webmethods is evolving from an enterprise application integration(EAI) vendor to being a provider for SOA & BPM services, according to Marc Breissinger, CTO at Webmethods.

More on it at, SearchWebServices and Computer Business Review.

SOA

Nice definition of SOA by IBM

Service: a repeatable business task.

Service Orientation: Integration those service which are linked & their outputs

Service Oriented Architecture: An architectural design that provides support to service orientation.

India: The IT Destination

As reported in International Herald Tribune:

The IT industry has created the maximum number of career oppurtunities this year, more than any other sector in India. India has harnessed the power of low-cost educated labor to build the off-shoring oppurtunities.

According to one of the reports nearly 42% of the new jobs advertised in the 2 months of this year were by the information technology sector. This survey was done by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India Eco Pulse, or Assocham Eco Pulse, which tracked job insertions in January and February.

India accounted for 44 percent of the $39.6 billion in work that was sent abroad mainly by U.S. and European companies in the year ending March 31, 2005, according to industry lobby-group National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom. Canada got $12.6 billion and China $1.9 billion.

According to a December report by Nasscom and McKinsey, with routine back-office work which is performed from remote locations, India has the potential to get at least half of the $110 billion worth of global outsourcing contracts by 2010.

Also, according to one of the surveys by Assocham, the software sector is supposed to become a $60 billion industry by 2010, providing employment to nearly 2.2 mn people directly & about 6 mn indirectly.

Web 2.0 Hurrah !! or Hype !!

Indeed, Web 2.0 is a buzzword now. But what in the world is it & why do we need it ??

First thing first, its not just a one-off technology available of the shelf or downloadable, its just a tech movement.

Who is the world is running this movement?Run by massive participation of free minded people. It just exploded on its own & there was no one telling you about it. Its just exciting + free + accessible.

It was termed by few Open Source guys & it just became popular.

It doesn't have a business model & that is a business-mdel. Its just an innovation & so it does not have to have a business model.

Web 2.0 features Google AdSense, Flickr, BitTorrent, Napster, Wikipedia, blogging, services, syndication & much more. And Google has become a standard bearer for Web 2.0 as Netscape was a standard for Web 1.0.

Great work guys..

Coding vs. Configuring

Coding or configuring !! Am I coding ?? No, now its not coding but configuring. This has been a huge concept to sell, explaining people that in the integration tools, what matters is configuring, we are not coding now.

Probably for the development folks, configuring seems like working on hardware tools, but for the middleware folks, its all about, how good do they configure & not how good that code !! Just that its difficult to assimilate the information that is needed to configure.