InfoWorld calls SOA the “acronym du jour” and touts Services-Oriented Architecture as “…the new wave of IT infrastructure.”  Successful Web Service implementations no longer make news.  But it’s clear that SOA involves more than just using SOAP and WSDL to wrap legacy code or build Web Services.

What is SOA?  And what does SOA mean, really?  Is it just the latest vendor hype?  Or, will it provide real business benefit to your organization?

Understanding and Applying SOA introduces the Services-Oriented Architecture and explains both the theory and reality of this important standards-based application framework and strategy for business application agility, integration and sharing of common business processes.  This one-day survey seminar provides a comprehensive and independent overview of SOA, covering foundation concepts and facilities, as well as implementation strategies and issues.

Understanding and Applying SOA shows how SOA works and illustrates how the SOA approach adds business value via the deployment of shared and reusable application services in an open, platform-independent environment.

• What’s a Service?

• What’s a SOA?  How does it work and why is it different?

• How do organizations typically evolve through the stages of SOA implementation?

• When and how should organizations use the SOA approach?

Understanding and Applying SOA defines the three typical SOA implementation phases and shows how organizations can begin with local, limited scope SOA usage and evolve to B2B Enterprise SOA, and beyond.

• Phase 1: Mashups, data integration and wrapping Legacy code with SOA interfaces

• Phase 2: Internal SOA using collections of shared Web Services

• Phase 3: External SOA for B2B process interoperability

Understanding and Applying SOA uses non-technical language, models and graphic illustrations to explain the components of Services-Oriented Architecture:

• What’s a Web Service?

• What role does XML play in SOA?

• What do “abstraction”, “externalization” mean, and how do they promote agility?

• What do “loosely-coupled” and “cohesion” mean and how do they promote agility?

• What are WSDL and SOAP, and how do they work together?

• What’s Coordination? Choreography? Orchestration? How do they work?

• What’s an Enterprise Service Bus? What does it do? When do you need one?

Who Should Attend?

This seminar will meet the needs of two learner groups:

1. For leaders and technical staff in IT and the business areas who need "SOA Literacy", this seminar provides a concise primer in SOA concepts, facilities, issues and terminology.

2. For the leaders, technical staff, business analysts and business area staff who will design and create SOA applications composed of Web Services, this seminar will serve as "SOA 101", building a solid conceptual foundation for more advanced skills-building classes in J2EE Web Services, C# Web Services, Service-Oriented Analysis & Design (SOAD) Business Process Modeling, Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), etc.

Recommended participants include:

• IT and business area leaders who plan and influence application architectures & strategies

• IT and business area staff who will design SOA applications and Web Services

• Developers and Project Leaders who will build and implement SOA applications and Web Services

What You Will Learn

What is SOA?

• What’s a Web Service and what’s their value?

• What makes a shareable and reusable Web Service different?

• How do transactions aggregate into Web Services and choreographed business processes?

When and why would you use SOA?

• What are the typical SOA implementation stages?

• How does SOA support application flexibility, agility, scalability and quality?

• What business scenarios are best for the SOA approach?

• How does SOA help you address platform and application integration?

How do you build a Services-Oriented Architecture?

• How do Web Services work?

• What makes “loosely-coupled” so good and “tightly-coupled” so bad?

• What open standards does SOA rely on?  Is there more than SOAP & WSDL?

• What’s a Service Contract Language and why are they needed?

What’s an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)?

• When and why would you need to add a middle-layer?

• What does an Enterprise Service Bus do?

• How is the middle-tier implemented in J2EE?  In .NET?

• What’s Coordination? Choreography? Orchestration?  Are they the same?

• What’s BPEL and how does it work?

Seminar Outline

Part 1: SOA Definition & Philosophy- What is it? Why would you do that?

• Case Study Demonstration (Avnet)

• Service Example (Automotive Work Order)

• Definitions & Philosophy: Principles, Concepts & Facilities

  • Service

  • SOA Definition

  • SOA Business Drivers

    • Integration: Data & Process

    • Wrap & Reuse Legacy Functionality

    • Service Sharing & Reuse

    • Agility

• SOA Evolution: From Mashup to Enterprise Strategy

  • Service Scope: Mashups EAI, Wrapping, Service Collections, Coordinated Processes

  • Enterprise Scope: Department, Division, Organization, Trusted Partner, Public

  • Implementation Stages: Tactical Web Services, Internal SOA, External B2B SOA

• Multi-Dimensional Approach: Technology, Methodology & Sociology

Part 2: Architecture Overview- Basic SOA for Tactical Web Services

• SOA Framework: Original and Current

  • Architecture Components: From the Web & XML to Coordinated Workflows running on ESBs

  • Composite Application Architecture: From Requester-Server-Consumer to Find-Bind-Execute

• Web Service Technologies & Approaches: What’s different?

  • Component Coupling: Tightly-coupled vs. Loosely-coupled

  • Cohesion: Why more is (usually) better

  • Request/Result Transport: Asynchronous messaging vs. Synchronous RPC

• Key Web Service Interoperability Standards, APIs and Protocols

  • Find: Registration & Discovery via UDDI & Federated Registries

  • Describe: Metadata via WSDL

  • Connect: Establish Addressability via HTTP etc.

  • Transact: Function Request-Response SOAP

  • Transform: XML XSLT

• Composite Application Architecture Revisited: Real-World Partitioning & Structures

Part 3: Enterprise SOA- Evolution of the Middle Layer

• Architecture Drivers: What’s different?

  • Complex workflows…Long-lived and parallel threading

  • Distributed workflows…Multiple servers, domains & organizations

• 3-Layer SOA Composite Applications

  • Application layer functions: Logic, automated workflow, presentation

  • Coordination layer functions: Coordination, state, reconciliation, compensation

• Business Process Coordination, Choreography and Orchestration

  • Sequencing, selection and execution of web services

  • Event handler or trigger

  • Maintain the State of the business process

• Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

  • Business process articulation

  • Workflow scripting

  • WSDL extensions

• ESB: Enterprise Service Bus

  • Definition & Description

  • Features & Capabilities

  • Local or temporary storage of attribute values

  • Marshal & consolidate data between services

  • Format outputs

• Middle Layer Implementation

  • J2EE architecture

  • .NET BizTalk architecture

Part 4: Thinking About SOA

• What’s different technically?

  • Loose Coupling

  • Asynchronous Messaging

  • Coarse Granularity

• Architecture & Performance Issues: What price agility?

  • Abstraction & granularity options

  • Application & business process design impacts

  • Performance vs. flexibility

• Core Principles

  • How business requirements drive architecture drive solutions