How To Plan for SOA 2.0

What’s Ahead: Advanced SOA

Organizations that have completed at least oneservice-oriented architecture project should move onto what analysts have begun calling “advanced SOA.”

What’s the difference? Most current deploymentsare based on request-reply, while advanced SOAinvolves so-called event-driven architectures, saysYefim Natis, a Gartner vice president.

In request/reply SOA, a service retrievesinformation or performs an action on behalf ofthe requester to produce a result. Middleware forrequest/reply SOA includes Java Remote MethodInvocation or the Java API for XML. An example ofrequest/reply is a remote database query, wherea database server takes an incoming request froma remote client, processes the request and sendsback a result to the client.

Event-driven SOA has the sources, or initiatorsof activity, notify the environment of a change andthe execution code that processes the notificationat some point, possibly after additional events aredetected. The middleware is typically messagingor publish/subscribe services provided throughJava Message Service, IBM WebSphere MQ andTibco Rendezvous. Event-driven activities includemanagement of incoming calls at a help desk andsystems management.

Next page: Tips for Advanced SOA