What does it mean and what it's supposed to mean

The industry explanation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is pretty straightforward. SOA is an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software components. That’s the easy bit. Unfortunately the reality is that SOA is in danger of losing its true meaning within software engineering. Currently SOA is probably the most misunderstood and misrepresented set of engineering principles that has hit the IT marketplace since the advent of the Enterprise Java Beans - and we know what happened there. Within the architecture of SOA is the core premise of Universality. Universality is defined as the quality of existing everywhere. This important and simple premise has in many ways been obscured by many technology providers in their rush to release products to the marketplace under the banner of SOA.

So what do we do that’s different? Well for a start, we are not bound to any vendor’s product architecture. We are a very independently minded software solutions company that focuses on providing the best possible software solutions. More recently many of our enterprise Java solutions are based on best in class frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, Drools and Struts. Our SOA solutions are based on a similar principle utilizing best in class frameworks to deliver cost effective and highly performant service applications. Lets look at how we can help you

How we can help
One of the world’s leading on-line travel companies commissioned DSI to address their current and future needs with respect to Service-Oriented Architecture. SOA is an approach to building IT systems out of common parts, which sounds simple, but many companies are not adopting SOA techniques because they don’t have the knowledge necessary to implement it cost effectively and efficiently. This is where DSI can help.

Many companies have attempted to introduce code re-use as a fundamental principle when designing systems but have failed to do so due to the lack standards allowing components to communicate in exactly the same way across multiple platforms. This is an age-old problem that in many cases was solved, or was attempted to be solved, by the purchase of highly expensive middle ware applications. With the arrival of these new standards we can entirely replace the proprietary protocols and products (good as they were) made by IBM with CORBA, and Microsoft with DCOM. Even though these new standards are not mature, they do provide enough leverage for companies to start to look strategically at SOA as their future.

Lets now look at what we can do with these standards over the Internet. The Internet introduced much simpler standards like HTML and HTTP. These technologies have enabled millions of end users on the Internet to share and access information instantly. HTML and HTTP help give the impression of a connected online society, but that’s not really how it is in the real world. The amount of work it takes an IT department to get data repurposed and secured for Internet publication is typically cumbersome, slow, complex and initially expensive, especially if the data 'sources' resided on a heterogeneous network or resides on another partners server farm. But by using HTML and HTTP as our base technology platform and by adding technologies like XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) you now have the building blocks for service orientation. DSI has spent many years designing and implementing large scale applications for the Retail and Health Care industry and has first hand experience when it comes to understanding what it takes to ensure software continues to contribute to the bottom line through re-use long after it has been written.

For our client in the on-line travel business the approach was very simple, pick the low hanging fruit and progress from there. SOA is not about re-writing major parts of your application over night but about identifying those areas that are suited to a services architecture and building from there. What DSI has been able to do for their client is, educate them on how SOA can be of benefit, outline and document the key areas associated with SOA which will work for their business, select and build some initial services and finally, implement a framework which will ensure the client’s developers can concentrate on writing business domain software ensuring their business can react to changing markets more efficiently and cost effectively thus promoting profitable growth.