Web Services Automatically Leads to SOA: Tornado in a Junkyard?
The great astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle once observed that it's unlikely that a tornado passing through a junkyard would ever assemble a 747. The same holds true for Web services gelling into SOAs. It's going to take planning and hard work.
If you have been following the avalanche of industry pronouncements over the past six months, it may appear that we're moving out of the Web Services Implementation Phase into a grand new phase of "Service-Oriented Architecture." One can be forgiven for thinking that SOAs are now everywhere.
The industry is all aglow with the coming wave of SOA. Reputable analyst firms such as The Yankee Group predict that 75% of organizations have plans to begin building an “SOA” within the next year. SOA advocates – which now seem to include every vendor with a piece of code to sell – say the new approach can break complex and incompatible applications and processes into granular, standardized components that can be assembled and dissembled as business needs dictate.
Of course, the evolution to SOA is what Web services has been about all along -- loosely coupling standardized application components via orchestration and registries to follow or create new business processes.
However, Webservices.org's own survey has found that we still have a way to go before our collections of Web services are magically fused into fully functioning SOAs. The survey found that 35% of businesses have or plan to have a fully functioning Web services infrastructure in the near future. At this point, about 18% can be considered “SOA-ready,” meaning they are part of an infrastructure of standardized, loosely coupled services. For most companies, the hard work still lies ahead. About 24% have simple point-to-point implementations, and 29% are still in the development stages.
Many Web services projects – the building blocks of today’s SOAs – are just getting off the ground, and have yet to touch core mission-critical systems found in enterprise data centers. Rather, they are more likely to be associated with Websites and other edge-of-the-enterprise projects. There seems to be an awful lot of confusion out there about the difference between Web services and SOA. You can have a thousand Web services, but that will not give you an SOA. SOA can’t be built in one swoop – rather, it will be a phased initiative that must be planned, designed, and built out over a period of years.
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