The Scalability Argument for Service Enabling Your Applications
I am a proponent of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to building large scale systems. I have been for the past decade. It just makes sense to me to build software with service interfaces. The weakness of this approach comes at the tool and platform level. I tried the SOA approach on Oracle WebSphere and IBM Rational Application Developer recently. While I can build an application's business logic in say 465 lines of code, it takes another 270 lines of code to configure the service for deployment. We have a problem when it takes 37% of an application's code simply to deploy your service.
Solving this problem requires every software architect and business manager to get the SOA development platform provider's attention. Hey! We need a solution!
That is why I put PushToTest's resources behind building the SOA Knowledge Kit. The kit defines a typical manufacturing Use Case: Order a product through a Purchase Order pricing and inventory service. The kit implements the Use Case on IBM WebSphere Process Server (using Rational Application Developer and IBM WebSphere Integration Developer V7.0,) Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 (11.1.1.5.0), and TIBCO ActiveMatrix SOA Product Suite 3.13. I then put the kit into a free open source software distribution.
Open sourcing the kit puts the SOA platform providers into a position where they need to fairly compete for our business around the same use case. Competition is a powerful way to get them to solve the deployment issue. For example, TIBCO turns out to be 29% less expensive to build and deploy the SOA use case than Oracle. Hopefully Oracle will respond to the SOA Kit with their own implementation and the experience will show them where to improve Oracle 11g's SOA construction and deployment capabilities.
Gartner has all along been in favor of SOA construction and deployment through Service Virtualization. I'm glad to be a speaker at Gartner's Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (AADI) conference in Las Vegas on November 29, 2011. At the conference I will present the findings from the SOA Knowledge Kit, including our Developer's Journals, the use case software code, the architecture, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model, and best-and-worst-practices learned while we built the Kit.
I would be glad to meet with you personally to brief you on our findings and answer your in-depth questions.
Click Here To Make An Appointment At The Gartner AADI Conference
If you are not going to be in Las Vegas then please consider attending our upcoming free interactive Webinar titled "Pitfalls of Using Oracle, IBM, and TIBCO To Build Scalable Applications". Bring your best questions to the Webinar.
Frank