All You Need to Know About Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the iSeries

All You Need to Know About -
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
and the iSeries
All You Need to Know About 'Service Oriented Architecture' (SOA) and the iSeries

What does looksoftware mean by SOA exactly? SOA is a set of architectural and design principles that are probably new to most iSeries people. SOA considers an enterprise as consisting of many processes and services. SOA comes with the expected set of acronyms and jargon, such as "loose coupling" and "granularity" and is typically implemented with Web Services. SOA promises to deliver increased business agility by enabling IT professionals to easily reuse and integrate applications in a standardized way. By reusing chunks of application functionality across platforms, we can begin to refine, streamline, and perhaps, even create new business processes - on the fly. A simple way of understanding Web Services (and avoiding technical discussion of WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI) is to think of them as a standard way of calling a program that may be located on another platform. By using tools that create Web Service wrappers (and generate the SOAP and WSDL etc.) for your existing applications, cross-platform integration can be achieved much more painlessly than in the past. Our new product, 'soarchitect', provides iSeries users with a practical path to Web Services and SOA because it generates Web Services from existing applications. This means iSeries users are able to reuse their existing, monolithic, applications and make them much more flexible by providing integration based on Web Services. The looksoftware modernization suite provides access to the presentation, application and data layers of iSeries applications to create reusable adapters that may expose chunks of application functionality - see the example below titled 'Exposing an iSeries Application Function as a Web Service'. What do we mean by the 'Dynamic Environment'? Are we referring to real-time transactions, or is it more than this? For ten years Gartner has been talking about the real-time enterprise, supported more recently by IBM's 'On Demand' and HP's adaptive enterprise messages. The idea being that as business agility improves, so our systems and processes can adapt to change more quickly. looksoftware's 'Dynamic Environment' is designed to accommodate change in real-time, so your applications can continue to be enhanced without repeated conversion, collection or re-compilation. Objects are created dynamically, based on the execution state of your applications and your custom rules. This 'just-in-time' process allows you to modernize existing applications and compose new applications much more quickly than previous generation batch-based solutions. This results in increased business agility and significantly improved ability to respond to the inevitable new events that seem to arise in business all the time!
All You Need to Know About 'Service Oriented Architecture' (SOA) and the iSeries

Composite Applications - how do they fit with the idea of SOA?
Composite Applications are about creating new systems by reusing old ones in clever ways. Reuse is the common theme of Composite Applications and SOA. If we are able to access our existing applications as useful chunks of function, termed 'services', then we have a means of accessing even monolithic applications in a more modular way. That makes the delivery of Composite Applications feasible - because now you can assemble/access the services, perhaps add some business rules and deliver the 'new' solution. What's the profile of the typical client wanting SOA at the moment? Any organization that has a significant investment in existing applications should be interested in service-enabling their applications and, of course, there needs to be a clear business driver. More often than not, these applications have evolved over years of refinement and provide robust support for the organization's business processes - in many cases reusing these applications makes the most business sense. Another relevant sector is the ISV community. These are software companies that have produced vertical applications who can't afford the costs, risk and timeframe required to develop them from scratch again. By offering their customer... [download for more]