After two successful events in the Netherlands, it’s now time to go to Berlin in Germany. Though it requires some more traveling for us Dutchies, I see a lot of Dutch speakers and sponsors on the website. I’m very happy that I again have the privilege to give a presentation myself on the symposium. My talk is titled “A Multi-Domain Modularization Approach for Achieving More Organizational Agility”. It is about some preliminary results of my PhD research. Have a look at the abstract of the talk: http://soasymposium.com/agenda2010.php#a_multi.

To the readers of my blog and the business contacts of ICRIS I can offer a discount to this event. Let me know if you’re interested! Oh, and that’s not all. From this list of people who get a discount of ICRIS, we’ll randomly select three people who win one of these books “SOA Design Patterns”, “Enterprise Ontology – Theory and Methodology”, “Rode tuinkabouters bestaan niet” (Dutch).

So have a look at www.soasymposium.com and let me know if you’re interested in participating!

* Cross out the names of the competing products.

“Wave is real-time e-mail. What that means is that when you’re writing a reply to a message (or ‘wave’) that you receive in the system, the recipient can see what you are typing as type it. ”

Didn’t I see this ‘innovative’ feature before? Yep…. it was 1996 when I was using the chat program PowWow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program) .

So, I’m looking forward to using Google Wave for the collaboration process of writing an article. Let’s see whether or not it provides any additional value compared to plain old email.

By the way, PowWow also had support for VOIP, sharing a white board, and surfing the web together.

Let’s have a look at a short impression of these days.

Day 1

At 9.00 my former colleague Art Ligthart officially opened the conference. Next, Thomas Erl and Anne Thomas Manes gave their keynote lectures.

I followed Thomas and Anne to their presentation “Exorcising the Evil SOA: A Necessary Step Towards Next Generation SOA”. Quite a nice show about the exorcism of the Evil SOA, a black crowlike figure. He represented the “vendor-pushed, strongly marketed, it will solve all your problems” SOA. Fortunately everybody in the audience seemed to have seen Linda Blair during their childhood and it posed no problem to exterminate the Evil SOA. After this exorcism (during which somebody even fainted) the Good SOA arrived. With her nice white wings she told her how SOA should be. For a moment or two I considered wearing those wings to my presentation the next day .

The second presentation I attended was the one of Clemens Utschig-Utschig and Torsten Winterberg: “Next Generation SOA Practices and Patterns”. Though there were some interesting elements in the presentation about specifying events, I had some problems with the outline. It was focused very much on BPEL and to “deal with” people BPEL4People is used. However, not all processes can be efficiently supported by activity-based process automation tools. Sometimes case-based management systems are more appropriate or even less structured social collaboration software. And… don’t forget…. a business process is about people! The tools should support people and not the other way around. All in all, the technical stuff in the presentation was good, but I have a bit of a different view on the notion of business process.

In the afternoon I wanted to attend the presentation “Why Business People & Software Architects Don’t Understand Each Other” by Jaap Schekkerman. Unfortunately the room was already full when I arrived.

Grady Booch provided the closing keynote “SOA as an Architectural Pattern: Best Practices in Software Architecture” using Second Life. This guy is really great! You can really notice that he back a long time. An entertaining detail: it was about 4.00 AM for him and every now and then a yawn came out. Concluding: I am a fan of Grady! Next year he should be attending IRL.

Day 2

The second day I had to skip the morning. The first presentation for me was “An Insider’s Look at BizTalk Server 2009: Integration Server, SOA Foundation, Gateway to Azure” of Brian Loesgen. Brian really had too much to say for 45 minutes, but to deal with this he had three presentation slots at the conference. Because I don’t often work with BizTalk it was nice to get an overview of the product.

Paul Mooney told us about “Service-Oriented Solution Evaluation Criteria”. I expected to get some info on how you can measure whether or not (or to which extent) a service conforms to certain principles. Instead it was a summary of the principles as they are defined by Thomas Erl.

Next, it was time for my little show with Alexander den Hartog: “Event-Driven SOA in a Dredging Environment”. Well, I liked giving the presentation with Alexander. I hope the participants feel the same .

In the following presentation the SOA manifesto was presented. Impressive how such a large group created actual results! Good job SOA manifesto group! Have a look at http://www.soa-manifesto.org/.

The last panel about the ESB with Jim Webber, David Chappell, Brian Loesgen and some other person of who I don’t remember the name (sorry!) was really really entertaining. Jim is well-known for his anti-ESB attitude… Also, the conclusion gave me quite a laugh “So, we can conclude that declarative specifying is better than …… uhmm….. uhmm… non-declarative specifying”.

All in all, I really enjoyed the symposium and I’m looking forward to next year’s edition!

Please visit www.soasymposium.com and see you in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in October! There’s no excuse for any architect for not being there .

The article can be downloaded from http://www.icris.nl/wp-content/whitepapers/SOAdelivery.pdf, the full master thesis from http://www.icris.nl/wp-content/whitepapers/thesis_joeri_terlouw.pdf.

Let’s have a look at the abstract.

Abstract
Organizations should carefully consider which SOA delivery strategy, for instance top-down or bottom-up, to follow in migrating toward a service-oriented environment. Selecting a suboptimal strategy can result in spending more time and money than required, or in complete failure of the SOA project. However, selecting one is not easy. Organizations are often unaware of the existence of the different strategies and their situation-dependent pros and cons. Also, it is impossible for organizations to make a well-founded choice since a method for selecting an SOA delivery strategy is lacking. This paper bridges that gap by proposing an assessment method to select a delivery strategy based on specific characteristics of an organization. The method comprises a matrix that includes the influencing factors with their corresponding value ranges, and a weight calculation to determine their impact. Another contribution of this paper is the elicitation of four different delivery strategies that have never been chartered properly.

Do’s:

1) Appoint a service catalog manager 

Though the service provider is responsible for specifying his service, we also need a service catalog manager. This person checks whether the quality of the service specifications meets the standards. He keeps the catalog up and running. And, most importantly, he leads the processes of accepting a new service, changing the life cycle status of a service, versioning services, and killing services. No chance for JABOWS with a service catalog manager around! 

2) Make a canonical data model

It is important for services to speak the same language. Usually the ESB is used for mapping data from a native application format to the canonical data model. The canonical data model differs from the so-called corporate data model. The corporate data model describes all data within the enterprise. The canonical data model only describes data to be exchanged by services. Do not only pay attention to specifying the syntax of the data, but also to the semantics. We would not want another space shuttle to crash because of a simple inch/centimeters mix-up. 

3) Specify who, what, and how

Essentially thee aspects are important in a service specification: the who, what, and how. We want to know who offers the service; do we trust this person and how can we contact him if needed? We want to know what the service does, e.g. input, output, preconditions, postconditions, description of behavior. Also, the non-functional behavior (e.g. availability, security etc) belongs to this `what’ part. Finally, we are interested in how we can access the service. We need to know the location of a service (usually a logical location) and what protocols to use. Sometimes we are also interested in `how much’, i.e. what do we need to pay to use the service.

Don’ts:

1) Assume WSDL is enough

Don’t think the WSDL is enough for the consumer of the service to know what the service does. It just isn’t. Additionally, the WSDL is only suitable for one type of stakeholder: the software engineer.  

2) Assume the UDDI standard is enough 

The UDDI standard work fine for dealing with a number of technical aspects and it gives information about who offers the service and how to access the service. However, it lacks proper means to describe the `what’ part. Most organizations use commercial service registries with add-ons on the UDDI standards, or additional Word or Excel templates. 

3) Assume providers will fill the catalog if they are not rewarded

Building as well as specifying services takes time, money, and effort. It is important to realize that service providers will only make services for service consumers if they are somehow rewarded. Both parties should have costs and benefits. A provider will not cooperate if there are only costs involved for him.

By far the best known standard for registering and searching for services is the UDDI. A great weakness of this standard is its technology-driven way of specifying services; it is still inadequate for specifying the majority of aspects that are relevant from a business point of view. This stands in sharp contrast to the main premises of SOA, i.e. increased flexibility by the reuse of services and better business/IT-alignment by speaking the same language. A more comprehensive approach to specifying services is the business component specification framework. One of the aspects that needs to be specified according to this framework are the business tasks. The framework, however, does not define precisely what a task is and how a task should be identified. In this paper we propose taking the enterprise ontology as a starting point for specifying these tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate our approach using a life insurance company case.

Thomas Erl (SOA Systems) opened the conference with his keynote “The State of SOA”. Also, he launches two of his new books at this event: “SOA Design Patterns” and “Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA”.

Sandy Carter (IBM) introduced the notion Key Agility Indictors, meant for measuring the agility of an organization (but not being a replacement for Key Performance Indicators!), in her keynote.

Cesare Pautasso (University of Lugano) told us about the differences between REST and SOAP in his presentation “REST vs. SOAP – Making the Right Decision”. I like his conclusion, i.e. “Don’t let it be a discussion on religion”. Always make a well considered choice based on real arguments.

My colleagues Art Ligthart, Jan-Willem Hubbers and I organized a workshop on service identification. Though the number of participants was limited to 30, we ended up with 54 people in the workshop room, and even 30 more waiting outside . The participants did a really great job in identifying the services for the insurance company Protector using the current systems and business process decomposition methods. By the way… if you attended the conference, were not able to make it inside and want more information about the workshop, just let me know!

The second day the opening keynote was given by David Chappell (Oracle) telling about the “Future State of SOA”, ending with the notion of the “SOA Grid” (further explained in his next presentation “The Service Grid: How Grid Technology is Shaping the Future of SOA”).

David Wisnosky (Department of Defense) provided the second keynote on “The 3 Main Pillars of the DoD Go Forwards Strategies”. He described very vividly on what to do and what not to do when implementing SOA. In his presentation in the afternoon he spoke about among other service registries and metadata registries.

Some pictures of the event (by the way, if you attended the event and want more pics, please let me know):

Ordina as founding partner of the symposium

The location is a bit unusual

Thomas Erl (SOA Systems) giving his keynote

Sandy Carter (IBM) giving her keynote

Art Ligthart and Jan-Willem Hubbers (Ordina) presenting the new Ordina book on SOA

Me (being one of the reviewers) presenting the Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA book written by Thomas Erl, Anish Karmarkar, Priscilla Walmsley, Hugo Haas, Umit Yalcinalp, Kevin Liu, David Orchard, Andre Tost, and James Pasley.

Lunch!!

Joe McKendrick and Thomas Erl

David Chappell (Oracle) telling us about the SOA Grid

Getting to meet people

Free books!

Relaxing….

Listening to the presentations

11.45 – 12.30: A Canonical Data Model for a Common Semantics
Drs. Guus van der Meulen, Systeem Integratie Specialist, Ordina

12.30 – 14.00: Lunch

14.00 – 14.45: A Case Study at the IND (Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service)
Simone Dobbelaar, IND

14.45 – 15.00: Break

15.00 – 15.45: SOA belongs to the professional sports leagues! About the (un)usefulness of architectures and methods.

More info can be found at this website: LAC website.