For last several months, OASIS, OMG and The Open Group worked together on 'SOA Harmonization' white paper. This document describes
• the types of the Standards in SOA arena from Each Standard Body
• Overview of and Guidance on Standards
• Inter-positioning of the Standards
• SOA and SOA Governance Core concepts
There are several goals of this collective effort that include, among others,
• Conveying "the same fundamental concept of SOA regardless of starting point"
• Helping navigate through overlapping standards
• Differentiate and select specification to particular needs
• "Outline the agreement on core SOA and SOA Governance concepts"
• "Establish collaboration between the Standards Bodies"
• "Encourage consistency across the standards addressing the various aspects of SOA"
I specially would like to notice that getting an agreement between the Standards Bodies, they had to come up with four categories of Reference Architecture (RA), in particular:
• Conceptual SOA RASince none of the participants had filled the 'SOA Enterprise RA' niche, it has become one of the target of the future collaborative efforts.
• Generic SOA RA
• Industry SOA RA
• SOA Enterprise RA
Another interesting fact is that the participants have positioned majority of their products (standards) in the area of "partial RA covering specific subsystems such as presentation, integration or security" or in the "technical RA covering only IT aspects". Nobody claimed any coverage of the business and IT aspects of SOA solutions, which a bit surprised me.
Anyway, I see this effort as a tremendously important and significant move in the Industry that gives us a hope on the 'end of standard wars and madness' and a chance to communicate about SOA in 'common' language.
One additional piece of information: I have counted up to 17 different standards (across all three Standards Bodies) related to SOA. However, none of them mentioned Web Services (WS*-) or REST related standards.
I can read this as a message - SOA is about architecture while Web Services (WS*-) and REST are about technology; we should not mix apples and oranges (unless we want to make a 'shake').
One additional piece of information: I have counted up to 17 different standards (across all three Standards Bodies) related to SOA. However, none of them mentioned Web Services (WS*-) or REST related standards.
I can read this as a message - SOA is about architecture while Web Services (WS*-) and REST are about technology; we should not mix apples and oranges (unless we want to make a 'shake').
One additional piece of information: I have counted up to 17 different standards (across all three Standards Bodies) related to SOA. However, none of them mentioned Web Services (WS*-) or REST related standards.
I can read this as a message - SOA is about architecture while Web Services (WS*-) and REST are about technology; we should not mix apples and oranges (unless we want to make a 'shake').
One additional piece of information: I have counted up to 17 different standards (across all three Standards Bodies) related to SOA. However, none of them mentioned Web Services (WS*-) or REST related standards.
I can read this as a message - SOA is about architecture while Web Services (WS*-) and REST are about technology; we should not mix apples and oranges (unless we want to make a 'shake').
Sorry for triplication!
Sorry for triplication!
Sorry for triplication!