Expoloring SOA design patterns
Friday, March 13, 2009 11:47 AM
In podcast series, Thomas Erl and coauthors of SOA Design Patterns discuss the SOA patterns identified in the book.
Many organizations' efforts to move to service-oriented architecture have been mired by organizational issues, by conflicting vendor messages, and by architectures that may amount to little more than just a bunch of Web services.
While no two SOA implementations are alike, Thomas Erl author of SOA Design Patterns, as well as a team of industry contributors, have effectively identified the similarities in composition services need to have at a sub-atomic level in order to interact with each other as we hope they will.
The book identifies 85 SOA design patterns which have been developed and thoroughly vetted to ensure that a service-oriented architecture does achieve the flexibility and loose coupling promised.
I mentioned in previous posts that I have had the opportunity to be a part of the launch of SOA Design Patterns. As part of the launch process, I have been conducting a series of podcasts with Erl and some of his co-authors on the SOA patterns identified and published in the book.
Here are but a few:
• Why SOA Design Patterns? In the first podcast of the series, Erl talks about the creation and purpose of SOA Design Patterns and the launch of the SOAPatterns.org community site that allows anyone to post new candidate patterns.
• Governance patterns: In this podcast, Erl and I talk about governance, one of the most important and least understood areas of SOA. He explains how SOA design patterns can address governance problems.
• Service inventories: Here, I talk to Erl about service inventories--collections of independently designed and governed services. He discusses the popular Domain Inventory pattern commonly used when enterprise-wide SOA adoption is not possible.
• Service contract design issues: He explains some of the SOA design patterns that address service contract design issues that occur both during the initial service design stage as well as subsequent to deployment, including versioning.
• Separation of concerns: Erl delves into core service-orientation theory by exploring a pattern sequence that results a primitive service definition process that essentially establishes how service-orientation is carries out the separation of concerns.
• Runtime data and data design patterns: In the sixth podcast of the series, Erl discusses SOA design patterns that relate to the processing of runtime data and data design. He highlights the Schema Centralization and Canonical Schema and Canonical Schema Bus patterns.
I am also wrapping up podcasts with co-contributors including Clemens Utschig (Oracle), Mark Little (Red Hat/JBoss), Thomas Rischbeck (IPT), and Herbjorn Wilhelmsen (Objectware).
In a series of related articles, Erl provides some more in-depth details on Service Facade, and Non-Agnostic Content, and Domain Inventory.
More information on these patterns, the book, and the SOA design patterns community is available from the SOApatterns.org site.
Joe McKendrick is an author and independent analyst who tracks the impact of information technology on management and markets. He is also SOA community manager for ebizQ, and speaks frequently on Enterprise 2.0 and SOA topics at industry events and Web casts. This article was first published as a blog post on ZDNet.com.
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