RE: [xml-dev] Re: Major Historical SOA Milestone Today

["Chiusano Joseph" <chiusano_joseph@bah.com>]

Your feedback and perspective are very valuable. Here is the challenge before us of we endeavor to each share a single definition of SOA. Below I present each of the 3 consortiums' SOA definitions - perhaps this may help folks understand the differences between each, and - perhaps - why having differences (difference foci) may be healthy:

<Definitions>
OMG:

Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural style for a community of providers and consumers of services to achieve mutual value, that:

* Allows participants in the communities to work together with minimal co-dependence or technology dependence 
* Specifies the contracts to which organizations, people and technologies must adhere in order to participate in the community 
* Provides for business value and business processes to be realized by the community 
* Allows for a variety of technology to be used to facilitate interactions within the community 

The corresponding definition of service has not yet been finalized but the sense of the group is that there would be both a business/domain centric notion of service as well as an interaction focused definition.

THE OPEN GROUP:

SOA is an architectural style that supports service orientation

* Service orientation: A way of a way of thinking in terms of services and service based development and the outcomes that services bring

* Service: A logical representation of a repeatable business activity that has a specified outcome (e.g., check customer credit; provide weather data, consolidate drilling reports), is self-contained and maybe composed of other Services. It is a black box to consumers of the Service

* Architectural Style: The combination of distinctive features in which Enterprise Architecture is done, or expressed

* The SOA Architectural style's distinctive features:
  
  - Based on the design of the services comprising an enterprise's
     (or inter-enterprise) business processes. Services mirror real-world
     business activity
  
  - Service representation utilizes business descriptions. Service
     representation requires providing its context (including business
     process, goal, rule, policy, service interface and service component)
     and service orchestration to implement service
  
  - Has unique requirements on infrastructure. Implementations are
     recommended to use open standards, realize interoperability and
     location transparency.
  
  - Implementations are environment specific, they are constrained or
    enabled by context and must be described within their context.
  
  - Requires strong governance of service representation and implementation
  
  - Requires a "Litmus Test", which determined a "good service"

OASIS:

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations. (NOTE: This is from the SOA-RM Glossary, but we can consider the entire spec to be a definition for SOA, as it is a reference model)
</Definitions>

Any feedback on why the creation of a single, shared definition may (or may not) be the best approach would be very valuable. I'm all ears.:)

Thanks,
Joe

Joseph Chiusano
Associate
Booz Allen Hamilton
 
700 13th St. NW, Suite 1100
Washington, DC 20005
O: 202-508-6514  
C: 202-251-0731
Visit us online@ http://www.boozallen.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrzej Jan Taramina [mailto:andrzej@chaeron.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2006 4:31 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: [xml-dev] Re: Major Historical SOA Milestone Today

Joseph said:

> Though the call began with the context of harmonizing our definitions 
> of SOA to have a single, shared definition, in discussion we realized 
> that that would not be possible given the differences between the 
> consortiums, the areas that we each focus on, and the role we each 
> play in industry

Great...3 different definitions of SOA...with a 4th coming when W3C gets involved, and many more (ie. IBM, Sun, etc. variants).

And people wonder why organizations are confused as to what SOA is or should be and thus are sceptical and have a gut feeling that SOA is yet another meaningless IT marketing buzzword.

Sad, but so it goes.




Andrzej Jan Taramina
Chaeron Corporation: Enterprise System Solutions http://www.chaeron.com


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