The one thing that unifies the distributed computing style known as SOA, in most of its manifestations, is self-describing data via the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The benefits of XML over opaque message formats in data interchange are well established. No matter if your focus is...

For one of the projects I worked on, we had to build a sales support system for a mobile operator. It would probably not come as a surprise to you if I told you that the competition between mobile operators is very fierce. The result of this competition is that the operator's marketing...

Another important attribute of service construction is: How do we handle messages once we get them either on the edge component or in the service? The Transactional Service Pattern allows for solving this problem while also dealing with reliability problems. The nominal scenario of SOA...

Service-oriented architecture has become the leading solution for complex, connected business systems. While it's easy to grasp the theory of SOA, implementing well-designed, practical SOA systems can be a difficult challenge. SOA Patterns provides detailed, technology-neutral solution...

While EDI transactions account for most worldwide commercial activity, XML-based alternatives are beginning to gain traction. According to Forrester Research, stateful XML, stateless XML, and even flat file exchanges are all projected to grow at a faster rate than EDI over the next few...

The Internet's a dangerous place for a message. Component failures, network connection issues, and other problems can prevent a message from being delivered. Fortunately, there's WS-ReliableMessaging, which makes sure messages get through. This article explains how to use reliable mess...

According to Wikipedia, 'The last mile (or last kilometer) is the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer. Usually referred to by the telecommunications and cable television industries, it is typically seen as an expensive challenge because 'fa...

Whether you work for a very large company with thousands of services in production or a small company with only a couple, visibility into the performance and uptime of those services is critical. Before you start investigating the myriad of governance products on the market, many of wh...

Cost cutting is a common demand that is levied on technology organizations. Consequently, each new paradigm within the industry is pitched by some as a cost-cutting strategy. The trouble is that many enterprises attempt some grand enterprise-wide deployment rather than incrementally gr...

Composite applications are the new breed of applications that are built rapidly by composing ready-made configurable and customizable service components together. This is similar in spirit to creating new recognizable objects by snapping together pre-fabricated Lego blocks in unforesee...

These days nearly every sizable organization has either implemented some form of SOA or has it on their roadmap. They quickly find that SOA efforts tend to expand like spider webs, eventually touching every corner of IT as well as the business itself. Due to the vital role that data pl...

Web applications built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) promise to greatly improve IT efficiency and business agility. SOA establishes data and protocol standards so that existing internal and third-party application modules or services can be reused and orchestrated into busin...

Layer 7 Technologies announced its go-to-market partnership with Steria Benelux. Steria will act as a channel partner for Layer 7's SOA gateway products in Belgium to offer leading SOA security, governance solutions and support to its current and prospective customers.

Adopting SOA is a lot like gardening. It takes time, skill, a lot of hard work, and the process can be messy and even a bit frustrating at times. I know you've probably heard tons of different analogies that attempt to put SOA and governance into everyday terms and I'm sure that growin...

Not all services are created equal. It would be great if implementing SOA were simply a matter of applying a standard design pattern to all services. Once IT had identified and codified an optimal design standard, services could be stamped out in assembly-line fashion until the IT land...

Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems to work with each other. In the loosely coupled environment of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), separate resources don't have to know how each of them work, but they do need to interoperate with each other by having enough co...

If you read this column and listen to my podcasts, you know that I call SOA what SOA is - an architectural pattern. In many instances, SOA is a vital component of healthy enterprise architecture. Indeed, I've provided some keynote talks around this very topic at about half-a-dozen ente...

Composite applications are made up of discreet services that have been tried and proven reliable, but building an orchestration that incorporates services that come from several sources, some of them outside of the company, could introduce testing hazards beyond just bad output. For ex...

The way business applications are evolving, enterprises are learning to accept and embrace the notion of applications that they neither control nor host. Now enterprises are leveraging applications that run a business through the Internet platform. As these applications become core to ...

We've all experienced the thrill of acquiring a new product only to have it diminished when it's not as easy to use as expected. You rip open the box ready to start playing with your new gizmo and 20 minutes later you're stuck on the phone with tech support because the instruction book...

To mark a new standard in the SOA space, I create a Google Alert and sift through the pile of links returned to get the scope of its maturation. I'm currently tracking over 60 standards, starting with SOAP and XML (XML happened way before Google was cool).

Last month an alliance of leading vendors announced progress on specifications to define a language-neutral programming model for application development in SOA environments. They call this specification Open SOA Collaboration. In essence, they are proposing a new standard to create an...

It can be difficult for developers, architects, and managers to keep up with new software packages and releases. This can be especially true with fast moving technologies like Web services. This article provides an overview of the main technologies that comprise the Java Web Services D...

There is an old saying among standards wonks: 'The most wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them.' And this truism is more applicable today than ever before. There are so many WS-* specifications, I've started referring to them as WS-Vertigo.

It is sometimes beneficial to stop what you're doing, take a look around, and see where you've come from and where you are going. This regrouping is taking place right now across the software industry and is focused on the problem space of Web service description, discovery, and integr...

Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the right direction to start delivering on this promise.

The current slate of Web services standards has evolved into a mature set of very useful API's and into service-oriented architectures, or SOAs. Enterprise integration, however, includes many requirements that are not met by SOAs alone. A movement is under way to augment Web services w...

There's a common misconception that Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is useful only if all of your systems are Web services. This article describes how Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) enables BPEL to orchestrate nearly any legacy system as if it were...

Implementing industry standards for business processes can do far more than provide a common protocol for operations. Once commodity information or documents are standardized, it makes sense to look at what common actions need to be taken on that data or document - and standardize thos...

There is a need for container-managed support for local invocations among colocated Web services. This feature would be similar to EJB local invocations in the J2EE world.

Business is becoming increasingly virtual and decentralized, while real-time management of relationships with employees, contractors, partners, suppliers, and customers is becoming ever more crucial. Even within a single company, applications may reside on different platforms, in separ...

UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) is fast becoming a standard for storing business processes available on the Web. Although UDDI is capable of storing many different types of data, for the purposes of this article I'll focus on how UDDI can be used to register We...

In recent years the application server has greatly evolved, expanding the set of core services provided by the infrastructure. The current Java platform supports XML data handling, scalability, load balancing, and other capabilities that allow application-level services to be developed...

As enterprises build a critical mass of Web services, they need some way of keeping track of those services. UDDI is an ideal store for such information. Using UDDI's built-in abstractions of business services, binding templates, and tModels referring to interface specifications, UDDI ...

Web portal software has emerged as one of the most important components of software enterprises over the last few years. That success has carried with it the challenge of how to integrate disparate software services into the portal - services that can live across multiple platforms, op...

In July 2003 a consortium of Web services vendors released the Web services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) to the community. WS-CAF is comprised of three specifications that together provide a means of reliably composing individual Web services into larger aggregate applicati...

When dealing with application integration, as you know by now, we are dealing with much complexity. The notion of ontologies helps the application integration architect prepare generalizations that make the problem domain more understandable.

There has been much debate lately on what exactly WSDL's purpose is, and much of that debate has focused on whether WSDL is an interface definition language (IDL), or whether WSDL is better used to specify message-level contracts (without any associated operational semantics).

Over the past couple of years, several technology vendors have defined a comprehensive set of specifications that, when complete, will provide an infrastructure for enterprise-class Web services interoperability. The names of these specifications generally begin with 'WS-', so the grou...

As more enterprises move toward an e-business strategy, the communication and integration of disparate, heterogeneous applications and systems is key. Businesses must be able to securely connect and communicate with customers and trading partners alike.