SOA RoundUp: User-Developed Apps; SOA Leaders

I've been meaning to round up what was another spectacular run of bursts of brilliance here at the ebizQ site around SOA and things closely associated with SOA.
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ebizQ contibutor James Taylor, for one, blogged on the trend toward user-developed applications -- a subject close to the the hearts of progressive SOA thinkers everywhere. We thoroughly believe that users should be provided the tools to build applications that meet pre-established governance guidelines.

James sees plenty of opportunities here on the horizon, noting that "the ranks of businesspeople who are capable of developing applications are swelling, due to a combination of the technology-savvy Millennial generation entering the workforce, the proliferation of easy-to-use development tools, and burgeoning demand for applications. These businesspeople don't want developers' jobs; they just want to get things done. Their enthusiasm, however, may lead to poorly designed, insecure, and unscalable applications that application development professionals inherit."

Business people should be able to build their own apps, but should they also lead SOA? ebizQ Michael Poulan reports on a discussion with analyst Anne Thomas Manes, who feels SOA is an architectural style that falls into IT's lap -- not the business. However, Michael feels that "for SOA to succeed in mass, Business has to be deeply involved in SOS and, correspondingly, has to influence system architecture design.... SOA must be driven by business..."

And how should the design of SOA-capable services be guided? ebizQ contributor Brenda Michelson reports on a talk by Cory Casanave, CEO, Model Driven Solutions & ModelDriven.org, who discussed Enterprise SOA Modeling with the new OMG SoaML UML profile. SoaML is a UML profile and metamodel for the design of services within a service-oriented architecture.

We also had a enlightening exchange on the ebizQ Forum page, debating the question of whether SOA-related projects will increase or decrease in the future. Miko Matsumura said that "the pattern of coarsely grained reusable networked components (business services) for the Enterprise will definitely rise. Recent Gartner and Forrester research corroborate this, and in fact reassert that the name for those projects will be 'SOA.' SOA has undergone a lot of shifts in its storied history, but ultimately, the metapattern of aligning business and IT is pretty ubiquitous and organizations that don't shift to it will struggle."

There was general agreement that SOA will continue to increase as a force reshaping IT and the business. As Beth Gold-Bernstein put it:

"The real problem with SOA is the hype and the misunderstanding of what it is, what it can do, and how to design, manage, and reuse loosely coupled system components. We may be nearing the end of the hype cycle, and everyone who bought the hype but didn't to do work to figure out how to actually design SOA solutions have jumped into the trough of disillusionment and declared SOA dead. Now SOA can finally rise from the ashes in it's true form and potential, providing practical, adaptable, distributed and federated solutions."

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BY Joe McKendrick
Source：ebizQ

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