1. SOA Styles.
- Author
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Udell, Jon
- Subjects
- *
CONFERENCES & conventions , *COMPUTER industry , *SIMPLE Object Access Protocol (Computer network protocol) , *COMPUTER network protocols - Abstract
This article presents the author's views on the first Start of Authority (SOA) Executive Forum conducted by Infoworld in San Jose, California and in New York, both in May 2005. The juxtaposition of the two events helped me reconcile a deep schism between two factions, which I will call the WS and Web 2.0 camps. The argument, which revolves around pairs of opposing and overloaded words--simplicity versus complexity, decentralization versus centralization, agility versus stability--has been going on for years, but it is gotten really loud in recent months. Like a pair of bookends, our two keynote speakers neatly bracketed the debate. In San Jose, Motorola CIO Toby Redshaw sketched out a SOA deployment that was music to the ears of WS-aligned vendors and standards makers. For Redshaw, the key to success is shared infrastructure: a central directory based on the oft-maligned UDDI standard, and an enterprisewide WS management system. At our New York event, though, Harvard Medical School CIO John Halamka told a very different story. His task was to streamline financial and clinical data exchange across New England's network of physicians, hospitals, and insurers. The solution relies on techniques that Web 2.0 advocates know and love: XML across HTTP, secured with Secure Sockets Layer. Simple Object Access Protocol and WS-Security are part of the mix now, but the system was up and running before those standards were done. And to this day, for political and logistical reasons, it remains a loose federation with little shared infrastructure or central control.
- Published
- 2005