How To Plan for SOA 2.0

If your organization has implemented SOA, it may be ready for "advanced SOA."

What's Ahead: Advanced SOA

Organizations that have completed at least one service-oriented architecture project should move on to what analysts have begun calling "advanced SOA."

What's the difference? Most current deployments are based on request-reply, while advanced SOA involves so-called event-driven architectures, says Yefim Natis, a Gartner vice president.

In request/reply SOA, a service retrieves information or performs an action on behalf of the requester to produce a result. Middleware for request/reply SOA includes Java Remote Method Invocation or the Java API for XML. An example of request/reply is a remote database query, where a database server takes an incoming request from a remote client, processes the request and sends back a result to the client.

Event-driven SOA has the sources, or initiators of activity, notify the environment of a change and the execution code that processes the notification at some point, possibly after additional events are detected. The middleware is typically messaging or publish/subscribe services provided through Java Message Service, IBM WebSphere MQ and Tibco Rendezvous. Event-driven activities include management of incoming calls at a help desk and systems management.

Next page: Tips for Advanced SOA