Day 1 - 16:00 : The future of composite applications and SOA - everything they told you and why it isn't true (SOA202)

The presentation opened with a video about the history of models. You can view this light hearted video here: www.modelsremixed.com

Presented by Mark Berman and Steven Martin, this session covered (in quite simple terms) the future of SOA and some misnoma's about SOA in general. To begin with they addressed the following mistakes;

SOA is a product?
Service oriented architecture is not a what, it's a how. You don't go and buy Microsoft SOA or IBM SOA, you build applications using the principles of SOA. It's another way to build applications or even another way to re-purpose them. In fact most recent high ROI implementations of SOA haven't been green field developments, but instead have been a wrapper over existing software, exposed as SOA.

SOA aligns business to IT
No, this is what people do. No technology can align business to IT, only people can achieve this.

SOA governance fixes everything
This is wrong, SOA governance alone is not enough - governance needs to span all of IT, not just SOA.

SOA stops at the firewall
Notice in many organisations today how the administrator of the firewall holds immense power! To truly benefit from SOA we need to be thinking of SOA as starting at the firewall.

The presenters followed this up with a claim that essentially Microsoft pioneered SOA. This is claimed as Microsoft, along with other constituents, pioneered web services, a fundamental part of SOA itself.

One of the issues Microsoft are looking to address is how, it's perceived at least, only blue chip / fortune 500 / FTSE companies are able afford to implement SOA successfully. They wish to make it available for the smaller organisation too.

Dublin is the codename for a set of extensions to the windows server platform (IIS7 specifically) that are the next evolution of the WAS/IIS platform that will be used to host, run and manage windows communication foundation and windows workflow foundation applications.

Released after visual studio 2010, dublin will provide facilities to manage, throttle and inspect individual services within a deployed application. Combined with OSLO, the graphical modelling toolset and DSL environment, building, deploying and managing services is purported to become easier than it is at present.

Whilst this session was titled the future of composite applications and SOA, there wasn't enough depth to take away anything about the future of SOA beyond the rough idea of what dublin will be.