Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

I must say, InfoQ is doing a really good job of covering enterprise development with plenty of interesting articles on SOA. There is a really good interview from Jim Webber from Thoughtworks (The same company Martin Fowler works for these days). He talks quite a bit about MEST (Message Exchange State Transfer) and an useful "standard" to support MEST called SSDL. The main jest of SSDL is that it is a replacement for WSDL (Web Services Description Languages) based on SOAP that gets you out of the Request/Response hell that WSDL creates. SSDL allows you define much more complex web service interactions such as sending two requests to a web service and get 5 responses back. It's also interesting to note that there is a SSDL open source implementation done by Patric Fornasier of National ICT Australia as a research project called SOYA. It's built on top of Windows Communication Foundation and looks very interesting. Suffice to say I'm going to be be playing a bit with this shortly.

The interview with Jim can be found here: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jim-webber-qcon-london

More on SSDL can be found here: http://www.ssdl.org/

Lastly, you can find SOYA here: http://soya.sourceforge.net/

I'm currently working on a large IT Governance framework for a customer and as I was doing some research on the philosophies behind governance and change management when I came across a excellent wikipedia reference on Systems Thinking. The more I read and re-read the article the more I find the "thinking of Systems thinking" to be a useful for background for SOA. It provides some philosophical clues as to why and how service oriented architectures can used to glue and manage systems together both within an internal systems and it's parts and between systems. Definitely the thinking article for today.

Today (Thurs 20^th September) and tomorrow I'm chairing the 3^rd Annual Brightstar SOA and Web Services conference. It's also my third year of chairing it. The overview from Brightstar's Website:

SOA is now proving to be an effective strategy for dealing with enterprise software complexity in many organisations. The SOA journey has not been an easy task for many, but companies who have got it right are reaping the benefits, such as re-usable services and closer alignment of IT and business process.

So, what does it take to enable service oriented architecture into your organisation?  Where can you find out more about SOA and meet people with real-life experience and expertise?

Brightstar Conferences is pleased to announce our 3rd Annual Service Oriented Architecture & Web Services Conference, the number one SOA event in New Zealand.  This year's event will build upon the last two by shifting the focus on where SOA is at – internationally and in New Zealand, explore key case studies and experiences with SOA, and cover crucial issues and challenges as faced by the key players.

It's all about thought leadership, and about what we can learn from the practical experiences of those who have had success with SOA.  The journey of SOA is a challenging one, and we explore the crucial challenges along the way and ways to overcome these to enable service oriented architecture in your organisation.

Don't miss out on the Trans-Tasman case study by Catherine Anderson, Program Director, Smart eDA Program, SUSTAINABLE PLANNING, DEPARTMENT OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT, PLANNING, SPORT AND RECREATION on Addressing the Biggest SOA Challenge - The People Factor!

Key case studies from New Zealand's leading SOA and web services experts:
Simon King, Enterprise Architect, TELSTRACLEAR
Tim Chaffe, Enterprise Architecture Manager, UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND
Darko Spisic, Integration Services Architect/Implementor, Telecom NZ External/Integration Consultant

As well as all the key players in the SOA arena:
FRONDE . SOLNET SOLUTIONS . ORACLE . MICROSOFT . SUN MICROSYSTEMS . OPTIMATION . GEN-I .

ALSO - back by popular demand!  Our expert panel looks into the crystal ball of SOA on both current opportunities and considerations for the future.

Don't miss the opportunity to attend New Zealand's leading SOA event where you will find crucial information, be informed and meet all the experts.

As posted on Eric Newcomer's Weblog, WS-TX 1.1, the group of standards consisting of WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity has now become an OASIS standard.

Very interesting webcast on how SalesForce.com does integration. It's a good example how a SaaS offering like SalesForce.com can provide an effective platform for integration. This is perfect for the majority of business who are contemplating a SaaS offerings but have existing applications to integrate. I found the Google demonstration particularly fascinating - Certainly add more fire to rumours of SalesForce.com and Google moving ahead together. SalesForce.com market cap is 5.6 billion which Google could quite happily buy given the amount of cash they have. However people I've talked to in the know speculate that acquisition is unlikely but partnership is more realistic. Watch that space I say. One last random thought, imagine putting Apple into this mix. The combination of Apple/SalesForce/Google would be a very serious challenge to Microsoft both in the consumer and business spaces. A combination like this would be an end-to-end turnkey platform for both consumers and businesses and in the process a very massive threat to Microsoft...

Good article on Computerworld regarding the architecture aspect of SOA and how it is the most important part. Very interesting article by Galen Gruman.

If you have been following my personal blog (www.kiwibohemian.com) you might know that I've changed jobs having moved from Optimation to Fronde. At Optimation I had the title of Managing Principal and I was supposed to be doing strategic consulting (not much eventuated) but I ended up mainly focused on building the Microsoft Practice. Having moved over to Fronde I'm now no longer doing any active practice building (Fronde has a fantastic Microsoft capability already well in place) and instead focusing on Strategic Technology Consulting. Anyway, to cut a long story short – My focus has changed. I'm now focusing on Enterprise Architecture again and linking EA to Solutions Architecture as my day to day job. Part of my new focus is to pick a few key IT areas and I've tentatively decided to focus on Service Orientation, User Experience and to a lesser extent Microsoft Enterprise Technologies. To this extent I'm thinking I might refocus and even rebrand this blog around these areas. Any thoughts from blog land out there? Would it make this blog any more or any less useful? And yes it is 4am good Friday. Too many exciting things keeping me from sleeping J

Recently Ron Jacobs, (Blog is here) toured New Zealand to give a couple of talks to usergroups on Service Orientation and a few other interesting topics. Ron as part of his job at Microsoft runs Arcast - a community podcast for Architecture and Architects in the Microsoft space. While he was NZ, we caught up and he interviewed me for Arcast. It all came about from a conversation I had with him after one of his talks - that basically I said SOA needs to become more radical and more pervasive as a design and technology philosophy. The overview of the talk is:

"When web services first came about, most people wondered if they were really the right way to go. After all performance wasn't great for some things and the wire format of text/xml was rather large and bulky. Over time we came to think of SOA and web services as the same and developed ways of thinking about architecture that worked in this model. With the release of WCF however, this point of view is changing. Now it is possible to think of your applications as a collection of services both internally and externally. A radical concept you say? Why yes, it most definitely is and that is why today we bring you an SOA Radical - Lukas Svoboda. "

The Arcast post and topic overview is here, and you can download the podcast directly from here. Also currently listed at the top of the Microsoft Resource Architecture Centre

Mai-lan's Visio Blog on MSDN blogs has an excellent stencil for basic web service design including the famous "Microsoft" Web Services icon. I use it a lot personally in my diagrams as an image and it's good to finally find it as a vector based visio icon. Find it on this blog post

I guess the comic really does say it all!

I've been confirmed for "Implementing a Successful SOA - Realising Service Orientation" - A two day SOA workshop I'll be giving in Auckland and Wellington during Oct/Nov in association with BrightStar training. BrightStar are the wonderful folks who ran the three conferences I chaired in the last few years (two SOA and one general Architecture). Rather than being a conference this is a two day workshop to really get your head into SOA with yours truly. It represents over 4 years of active experience as an Enterprise and Strategic architect implementing real world SOAs for several key New Zealand companies such as Farmers Trading company and NZ Immigration Service. It brings all my thinking on SOA into two days of theory, background and practical advise on how to get into SOA. If this interests you jump along to the Brightstar site and register. There is a good discount for early bird registrations.

The course outline is as follows:

COURSE OUTLINE

Day One

What is Service-Orientation?
• Industry trends over the last five years
• Fundamental service orientation principles and tenets
• The relation of service-orientation and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• The definition of SOA from multiple viewpoints
• SOA as an IT philosophy

Service-Orientation as a Practical Theory
• What are services?
• The theory and detailed breakdown of a SOA

SOA - What are the Standards?
• Implementing SOA with web services
• Web services - standards and current status
• Technology implementation of these standards

Model-Driven Development and its Relationship to SOA
• Exploring model-driven development
• Detailing model-driven architecture
• What is contract-first development?
• Pros & cons of contract-first development
• The application of model-driven development of SOA

How SOA Affects your Architecture and Development Team
• How developers and architects need to think differently
• Training, personal development and SOA skills training
• Gaining buy-in from your IT team

Day Two

Prescriptive Guidance - The Microsoft SOA
• The Microsoft Technology Stack
• Microsoft SOA philosophy
• Practical guidance

SOA Case Studies: Objectives, Obstacles & Solutions
• Review of several NZ SOA case studies
• Issues and challenges
• Lessons learned: What went right? What went wrong?
• Identifying patterns which will work for you

Service Oriented Architecture and the Open Source Community
• The Open Source Technology Stack
• The Java Technology Stack
• Practical guidance

Service Oriented Management (SOM)
• Revealing SOM
• How does SOM affect your current IT operation?
• Successfully aligning SOM to your business

Aligning Architecture, Management and Governance
• Understanding the holy grail of implementing  SOA
• What is SOG (Service-Oriented Governance)?
• Realising service-orientation - Architecture, Management and Governance