Service Oriented Architectures - the NAL

One of my initial forays into SOA was when I was with the University of Arizona. We had begun by working and learning about web services, what they are, how they work, etc. That proved to be invaluable when we got to our SOA prototype. There were enough things to learn in SOA, and enough people to convince that it was feasible architectural pattern, that starting from scratch would have been very painful. I actually got sophisticated enough (for a 2004 SOA world) to have written, what I would call today, a primitive ESB. It has the basic functions of what you see today from Oracle or JBoss. It did some simple content-based routing, a lot of transforms with XSLT and it abstracted endpoints - albeit a limited number. Being in the academic world we put together a paper and got it published. It was for general consumption so it does not have a lot of hard-core technical detail but it served it audience.

If you want to read about it you can find an abstract of it at http://emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do?contentType=Article&hdAction=lnkhtml&contentId=1545651&history=false. If you like the old fashioned method, you can hit up your local library and look for Library Hi-Tech, Volume 24, 2006.

You can also check out the project over elsewhere on this site. It includes a Flash version of a presentation I did to the Deans of the Colleges of Agriculture and Libraries at the University of Arizona. I was really pleased with that presentation - it did the job of presenting the concept and got the Deans excited and talking about better ways to make systems work together and share information.

Posted at 11:13AM 10 Jul, 2008 by jhenzel in SOA  |  Comments[0]