Chris Tomkins’ Blog

Those of you who read this blog will probably know I used to post about work related topics at the SOA Tips ‘n’ Tricks blog along with a number of my IBM colleagues. Rather than continue to post there (think it might be a bit awkward - people from 2 major competitors posting on the same blog) I have just started my own BEA dev2dev blog which can be found here.

My aim is to post about how to do real things with the product and offer my own tips and tricks as to how to get the most out of the products - focusing mainly on AquaLogic Service Bus and AquaLogic Registry and Repository. My first post, entitled “How to add a service to AquaLogic Service Bus” is available now. I have got lots of other posts in the pipeline but would really like to hear from you about what you’d like me to write about. Before you ask though, I am not allowed to do any comparisons between IBM and BEA’s products - although I would really like to

Hope you enjoy reading it - if you do (or even if you don’t) - go ahead and leave a comment its always good to get feedback.

As Richard posts on his blog (SCA is a “Winner”) things are looking good for Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) which is great news as these technologies really do aim to simplify the development of solutions using a service-oriented approach. It looks like most of the big players have now joined the party (apart from Microsoft) which can only be good news for everyone involved including the standard implementors and the users of the standards themselves.

There are many definitions of the term service-oriented architecture (SOA) many of which describe it from a technology point of view (often including terminology such as web services) which I feel is wrong. The IBM definition of SOA describes it in business terms - a refreshing change.

SOA is not a product, or an IT solution that a business must have. It is an architectural IT approach allowing a business to:

• Be more flexible
• Be more responsive to change
• More easily integrate with 3rd parties
• Reduce costs through reuse

If you asked most businesses whether they wanted to be more flexible, be more responsive, more easily integrate with other businesses/partners and reduce costs the answer, particularly in todays environment, would almost certainly be yes. If you asked the same companies whether they wanted an SOA you might get a more mixed answer. SOA is simply an approach which helps businesses do business in a smarter way.