Supporting development/maintenance of EAI and Web services |
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EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: David Linthicum
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QUESTION POSED ON: 19 May 2003
How can I structure an organization to support development and maintenance of
EAI and Web services? We are preparing to staff and structure the organization to support the to-be-implemented EAI environment with an EAI tool. That is establishing a team of staff as Integration Support to looking after the "integration components" of the integrated applications i.e. not front- and back-end. Now that Web services have come, we are not certain how WS will be handled in terms of development and maintenance. We see them as total applications exposed in Web services format. How would you advise in regard to isolation of roles and responsibilities among applications development and integration support teams?
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Although all enterprises are different, a good rule of thumb is to staff
each integration server required with one administrator...somebody who can
change and maintain the server as the enterprise's needs grow or change.
Re: the second part of your question, wow, don't panic. If you are talking all new applications, then you'll have to build in the resources to Web service-enabled those applications at the start of their life, and then a layer of staff to deal with the inevitable issues as they function in run-time. The more applications linked using Web services, the more maintenance resources you'll need.
The introduction of Web services, as far as predicting the number of resources, is easy. It's just simple application development metrics, predicting the amount of time required to design, build and test an application. Building Web services into applications is nothing more than an application development exercise.
In some cases you'll have existing applications where you can't justify the
amount of work required to expose its services as Web services, or it's just
impossible. In those cases you'll need middleware to translate the application services. Work with the vendors, they will guide you as to the amount of maintenance required.
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