Service-Oriented Architecture Steps into the Future (continued)
Grow Up Fast
"We went from a traditional way of doing integration with data feeds and message brokers and made a hard right so that things could be more scalable and streamlined," says Rulf. "That's an advantage of SOA."
USi decided to use a middleware SOA software product for transitioning, rolling out and managing its SOA environment. The software includes components for discovering what services you already have available in your enterprise, then describing and defining those services using a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry, which has become a global standard.
"What happens in large organizations when you change to an SOA environment," says Jim Connolly, director of development for Kettley, a financial technology company based in Newport Beach, Calif., "is that you start losing lots of [code] duplication," thereby getting rid of the unnecessary data that gums up applications and, in Connolly's words, "kills an organization."
While Connolly agrees that cataloging and describing all of the functions in an organization is an enormous task, it's well worth the effort. After SOA is implemented, no time is wasted writing code that already exists -- a simple "call" to a service suffices. When a mistake is discovered, it only needs to be changed once, and all applications that use that service immediately and automatically switch to the corrected code. Services can be written, rewritten and tested without any change to the user interface before being described, cataloged and deployed. SOA provides greater efficiency and a large, well-organized software knowledge base. (article continues)
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