It is hard to avoid service oriented architecture.
SOA is one of those developments that the
whole IT industry is talking about.
Leading suppliers all have an SOA product line, but it is not
obvious whether the products being sold are really always as
leading edge as they are made out to be.
Many companies are fed-up with being expected to join the latest
IT bandwagon. They already bought into client-server computing, and
when that proved hugely costly, they were sold thin clients and
enterprise application integration (EAI). One wonders how many
successful EAI projects were rolled out. Not many. It was costly
and too difficult to maintain.
So the industry moved on a bit: the internet and HTML showed the
value of global standards and this led to the concept of web
services. As he explains in his Computer Weekly podcast interview,
Andy Mulholland, global chief technology officer at Capgemini,
believes that SOA makes IT integration easier because it deals in
standards. But is it just EAI by another name?
Perhaps not. Since IT functions built using standards can easily
be made available to other applications, SOA promotes the idea of
reuse. Code reuse cuts software development time and should improve
quality, since the reused code can be tested in many applications.
In fact, a measure of SOA's success is how much reuse is
achieved.
One cannot predict how long SOA will last, but what is certain
is that systems built using SOA today will be maintained by IT
departments for many years to come. However, the more code is
reused, the greater the impact of a flaw. SOA may well be the
medicine to cure all manner of IT ills, but IT directors may be
battling with SOA's legacy in years to come.
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