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Moving SOA Forward
SAS speaker Brent Carlson talks about how SOA affects the developer landscape.
by Kay Keppler

VSLive! San Francisco, February 10, 2005

Service-oriented architecture needs planning and implementation at the highest levels, but how does it affect the developer landscape?

"We've seen the emergence of the Eclipse environment taking the industry by storm," said Brent Carlson, vice president of technology for LogicLibrary and Software Architecture Summit speaker. "We're a member of Eclipse, we participate in the quarterly meetings, and we use it in-house as well as build on top of it. The basic Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a powerful tool for developing Web services. And then there's the individual ISV IDEs on top of that environment, such as IBM Rational Application Developer, SAP—NetWeaver Studio has a specialized capability around the SAP application suite—and others are taking advantage of that." Carlson said that gives LogicLibrary some flexibility with its own product, Logidex, to build once and then deploy into multiple environments.

The business logic necessary to build a successful SOA is complicated, Carlson said. "When we think about an SOA, one of the key aspects is to lay out a business architecture. So you'd have major business groupings of functionality—you can almost think of it as the componentized view of the business domain. If we think about e-commerce, we may have a set of services that support integration or action with our shipping partners. Another set might deal with tax issues—sales tax calculation, for example. If I'm international, I may need to deal with currency conversion. Each of those is a major chunk of function that I need to support in the services in my SOA."

To manage this complexity, LogicLibrary has a plan. "Logidex lets you lay out maybe a UML view of that world, maybe a more graphically oriented block diagram view of that world," Carlson said. "You can drop it right into the Logidex server, and then the services are built against it, they map up against that graphical model, and one can use the model right in the IDE to navigate as a click and search, essentially, to find the information along with a more traditional, text-based search. Then when you grab that service, you get the direct importation into your, say, Rational Application Builder projects, or you can do continuous development, and you can register your use automatically back with the Logidex server."

Carlson said that's one aspect of SOA that often gets lost. "You need to understand who's using what so that you have the ability to do impact analysis going forward. It's especially important with the flexibility that an SOA gives you that you understand whom you impact if you change a service—even operationally, if service XYZ is going down for the weekend. If we have an application that is mandated to operate 24/7 for business needs, we'd better find a way to provide a backup implementation for deployment in that service when we take that server stack down for maintenance."

That kind of information is important, and it must be easy for developers to support that traceability and governance so that happens naturally for them, according to Carlson. "You want developers to feel like they're not using a tool; it's just part of the IDE," he said. "That will let them do their jobs more quickly and effectively."

Carlson said this kind of transparency is simply a different form of reuse. "Developers already reuse functionality at the application server level," he said. "When you think about J2EE and all the different APIs of J2EE, that's reuse. Developers are happy not to have to reimplement a naming and directory service, or a messaging system—they just use JMS or JNDI to support that. And now we're moving up the food chain, so to speak, and giving it that same sort of capability, that same sort of searchability and discoverability at the business function level. And that ease of use will allow SOAs to take hold effectively going forward."

About the Author
Kay Keppler is Editor of Java Pro. Reach her at kkepler@fawcette.com.