WebServices dot org

Bridging the SOA Archipelago

A few weeks back, someone described to me how two major architectural teams within his company meet, on a perfunctory basis, for about 15 minutes a year, to exchange notes on various projects. What was amazing was to hear that the two groups were meeting at all.

It is only in the fortunate and unusually well-organized enterprise in which the work of Web services and SOA development is either spearheaded by a single team, or by teams working side by side. In fact, such an organization likely does not exist on this planet at this time. Instead, many Web services/SOA projects are built within separate silos by teams of individuals, with separate and often incompatible tools, that likely do not even speak to each other. The result is spaghetti-like crisscrossing of dozens, or perhaps even hundreds, of point-to-point Web services that may serve needs of individual business units, but lack comprehensive management.

There has to be a better way, say Frank Grossman and Jim Moskun, co-founders and president/CTO and chief strategy officer, respectively of Mindreef. Grossman and Moskun recently sat down with Webservices.Org editors to talk about the company's new "Coral" offering, and the challenges in building out Web services and SOA.

Think of "coral," and visions of colorful life forms come to mind, all interdependent in a great chain of life that creates a safe, sheltered lagoon. In the SOA archipelago, team members are interdependent upon one another as well, they say. Along these lines, Grossman and Moskun are zeroing in on what they see as the greatest obstacle to SOAs - the lack of a common, shared vision toward SOA within enterprises. Their solution, plain and simple, is to have all the disparate players involved with a Web services infrastructure - testers, architects, managers, and even business users - working on the same page. The result of all this collaboration can be a functioning SOA.

Sound utopian? Yes, the very thought of bringing all these players together, and having them work with a common set of tools toward a common purpose, seems just as likely as achieving Middle East peace. Even just getting different Java development teams to collaborate can be a challenge, Grossman admits. Add to that the challenge of getting a .NET team to talk to the Java group, or involving a mainframe developer in the process.

Yet, Grossman and Moskun say that you can't have an SOA without cooperation between people from across the enterprise. After all, the very goal of SOA is to provide reusable services that can be shared between two or more business units. "SOA is forcing a lot architects from different teams, organizations, to now come together and agree on things - even though it's a really painful process to listen to," he says. "The technologies to connect disparate applications are getting pretty well refined, but what people are struggling with now is how to get disparate groups to talk together, to collaborate -groups that might be using different platforms, different languages, different internal cultures," says Moskun. "Those are significant impediments right now to progress."

At the heart of any SOA effort, Grossman points out, is not just loosely coupled applications, but loosely coupled staffs. Yes, there are plenty of monolithic applications and information silos that need to be linked, he says. "When we look at an information silo, we actually see a group of people who built an application," he explains. "Because behind any application are the people that built and operate it. These people generally work very close in proximity, they have a lot of process already built up." These groups, which tend to range between 10 and 20 people, are essentially "mini ISVs" within the company, he relates. Grossman and Moskun's vision is to, essentially, break these groups down further to achieve more granularity between what they do and produce and other groups across the enterprise.

"Once you get to loosely coupled groups, this is where the flexibility really starts," Grossman says. "But this is also where the problems start, because you start to cross boundaries. And these boundaries are both logistical and political within companies."

As detailed in a special report on the Webservices.Org site, Mindreef seeks to supply, in their words, a common workspace that contains WSDL contracts, SOAP messages, and even simulations of works in progress. With Coral, Grossman and Moskun have laid out a technology platform that opens up to all the players involved in a Web services or SOA project - from architects to business end-users