If you've been getting the feeling like you're seeing SOA everywhere you turn, it's only because you are.
Maybe it hasn't gone all Freddy Krueger on you and invaded your dreams, but no doubt you keep bumping into it in project after project after project. That's actually a healthy sign. After all, if service orientation is a way of doing things across your business architecture then it should be something you do pretty much all the time.
Loosely coupled, agile systems that can be easily updated and integrated aren't a niche play. As we keep hearing, the real benefit of SOA comes when you make it pervasive. Of late we've been hearing a lot about SOA and data. Burton Group has made the case that SOA principles should apply to data access and management and that REST is ideally suited to SOA data services. We've run a podcast on the five most common mistakes in SOA data abstraction. We've looked into ADO.NET and Service Data Objects.
We've written about the battle to bring SOA together with Linux and the intersection of SOA and SaaS. We also put out an entire SOA Lifecycle All-in-One Guide with five different chapters containing a wealth of resources to walk you through SOA fundamentals, design, assembly, deployment and management.
And all of that was just last week.
It's the middle of August for crying out loud. Can't SOA just slow down and enjoy the scenery? That's the thing about something that's omnipresent, it can't. You're surely doing something at your company and chances are that SOA will be involved at some level.
This week we'll be looking deeper into open source SOA, into the controversy swirling around BPEL for People, into IBM's REST incubator Project Zero, into SOA virtualization, into the second edition specs of SOAP 1.2 and into how to architect distributed transactions in a Web services universe.
Being everywhere sure can leave you with a full dance card.
