Datasheet

14
Par t I: Get ting Started with SOA
Here’s a real-world application. Electrical appliances that you plug in at home
today plug in equally well at the office or if you move across town. If you
travel abroad, though, you likely need electrical adapters. When standard
interfaces don’t agree, you must adapt. Likewise, working with industry stan-
dards set forth by standards bodies enable autonomous entities (partners,
customers, and suppliers) to dance at the ball.
Sweeping Unsightly Technology
under the Rug
In the next chapter, we talk a lot about architecture. For those of you who
already know a lot about systems architecture and want more nuts and bolts,
we suggest you skim quickly through the “conceptual” chapters in Part II to
make sure you understand what we mean by the terms we use. Then dive
headlong into Part III, which we promise puts meat on the bones and gives
you a lot to chew on — metaphorically, of course.
One big reason we think business managers are going to like SOA is because
business gets to focus more on business and less on technology, SOA tech-
nology has the potential to become more invisible at the business layer, like
the plumbing in a well-designed home. In this chapter, we give you an over-
view of what the business can expect from SOA.
SOA enables business managers and IT to talk in business terms that both
sides understand. Without SOA, the IT developer and business manager typi-
cally use very different words for the same process: for example, creating
an invoice. The IT developer is concerned with APIs (application program
interfaces) and how to go about creating customer records from ten different
Oracle database tables. The business manager describes the actual business
process used to create an invoice. With SOA, a business service is a business
service is a business service. How that business service is implemented in the
technology layer is the purview of IT, and business managers need not worry
about it or its associated technical jargon.
Understanding Why SOA Is Different
Perhaps you’re skeptical. Perhaps, for as long as you can remember, the soft-
ware industry has been promising yet another silver bullet to rid you of all
business woes. We think now’s a good time to repeat that SOA is not about
“out with the old, in with the new.” SOA is about reuse: taking what you have
05_376843-ch01.indd 1405_376843-ch01.indd 14 12/2/08 11:50:31 PM12/2/08 11:50:31 PM