SOAs, Web Services Approaching Reality, Solution Providers Say

Service Oriented Architectures, or SOAs, are the latest incarnation of the distributed object architectures of an earlier era.

"The easiest way for a nonspecialist to think of SOAs is in terms of processes and to realize that whatever process is expressed is not anchored, frozen or limited to a [given computer] screen," said Ken Dorsey, CTO of Integrated Warehousing Solutions, a Downers Grove, Ill., solution provider. "The service is expressed by the software, in blocks of business logic that shouldn't be linked to a screen--pure unvisualized logic."

"If you do it that way, the service can be provided to another piece of software, another application," Dorsey said.

The separation of function from viewing device is critical because it gives customers more flexibility down the road. Today, the user device might be a desktop computer, tomorrow it might be a handheld with pen input or down the road perhaps some completely new gadget undreamed of today.

"It won't cost my customers downstream if they change devices," Dorsey said. "A few years ago they might have been on OS/2 and NetWare, then Windows 3-era UI, now BlackBerry or cell phone 3G interfaces. Back in the day, the punch card was the UI. Things change," Dorsey said.

Web services, and their ability to link data from different applications and geographic locations, are fundamental here. The tech world has been inundated with verbiage from vendors about the worth of Web services, complete with the same one or two demos, for the past three years. But now there appears to be some reality behind the marketing.

Progress Software, Bedford, Mass., surveyed 40 of its top application development partners that plan to move their applications to an SOA. One-third said their customers had no preference when it came to the user interface, while one-quarter cited interest in Microsoft .Net.

More than half (56 percent) were going the SOA route to integrate legacy applications. Thirty-three percent said they wanted to tie into non-Progress-based applications. Seventeen percent said they wanted to link to partners beyond their walls.

Jeff Broadhurst, president of Apprise Software, another partner, is equally bullish on Web services. "Being able to have the information in your corporate database available in realtime to different users [inside or outside the company] has real value," he said. Bridgewater N.J.-based Apprise makes software for wholesale distribution applications.

Web services "lets us put that information out there so they can have realtime access in the look and feel they're used to," Broadhurst said.

Virtually all of the respondents use Progress' own OpenEdge Release 10 application development environment.