"SOA Lite" - conference presentation

Most of the attention around SOA has focused on its application to the very largest enterprises. This focus is understandable - these megacorps are the ones that have the most to gain or lose from a new architecture (and also the biggest consulting budgets) - but it has meant that the issues and requirements of smaller enterprises have often been overlooked in SOA discussions. This is especially true in areas such as governance, where the requirements of the largest enterprises are very different from those of their smaller kindred. Applying SOA guidelines based on requirements that aren't appropriate for your business leads to governance bloat and bureaucracy. In this presentation you'll see how to apply SOA in a more agile fashion to allow small and mid-sized enterprises to gain the benefits of flexible service components without the governance overhead often associated with SOA.

"SOA sans SOAP" - conference presentation

SOAP launched the Web services revolution, and the new generation of SOAP-based frameworks are finally delivering on the potential of SOAP extensions to support security, reliable messaging, transactions, and more - features that can be crucial to SOA. Yet an increasing number of developers are becoming disenchanted with the complexity and overhead of SOAP frameworks and are choosing easier alternatives, generally in the form of services based on Plain Old XML (POX) message exchange over a variety of protocols. In this presentation you'll see how POX-based services can provide the same functionality as the lastest SOAP extensions, and even support interoperation with SOAP through adapters. Wash the SOAP out of your eyes and you'll learn to look at Web services from an entirely new perspective.

"SOA for Developers" - 1 day workshop

SOA is a great architectural concept, promoting organizational flexibility and code reuse within a framework that allows management and control over all parts of the operation. But moving your organization to SOA means IT developers need to change the way they address problems from a case-by-case, application-oriented, approach to one centred on interacting components. In this one-day workshop you'll work through the "SOAfication" of a simple example enterprise from a developer's point of view, learning the practical issues that make the difference between a demonstration project and a successful component based enterprise architecture. Along the way you'll see why common XML formats need to be defined for your enterprise data, and learn how to define these formats for interoperability with existing Web service frameworks while also allowing for future enhancements. At the design level, you'll explore decomposing applications into reusable components with clearly defined service contracts and granular interfaces. Finally, you'll see why developers need to be aware of the potential communications costs and overheads associated with moving from monolithic applications to loosely-coupled distributed components, and the impact of these issues in component design.

This workshop is programming-language independent, and most of the concepts apply equally well regardless of whether you're developing on .Net, Java, or some other alternative.

BIO Dennis Sosnoski