What are people working on these days, SOA-wise? That's the question put forth by SOA entrepreneur extraordinaire Dave Linthicum, who reports that the pace of SOA is slow, but steady.
Companies are not jumping head-first into new approaches and technologies, but are carefully planning and considering where they are going. Every SOA is coalescing into a different and unique combination of patterns (like snowflakes, DNA, and landfills). And while that doesn't mean a rush to embrace SOA, that's a very good thing.
Dave says he's seeing five essential activities underway at many locations:
Modeling and implementation: "Holistic modeling of the SOA and all of its working parts."
Security design and implementation: "Figuring out how you're going to secure and govern your SOA."
Semantic understanding and metadata modeling: "Identifying all application semantics and defining the common metadata model."
Service design and implementation: "Designing services properly, implementing them, and tracking them."
Orchestration and process modeling: "Modeling processes, and implementing them directly from the model."
Note the strong emphasis on modeling. This is important in making the architecture clear and tangible to the business users. Dave adds that SOA practitioners "are not yet looking for 'key enabling SOA technology,' at least not yet." As shown by the above five areas of concentration, the focus is on setting up methodologies, defining deliverables, determining how all of these artifacts are related, and education.
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