Gartner: SOA Design Patterns

As you know design patterns describe recurring solutions to common problems in software design. And recognizing and implementing these patterns is an essential part of successful Service Oriented Design. Below are 5 SOA design patterns that Gartner analysts have observed:

1. Multichannel Applications
2. Composite Applications
3. Business Process Orchestration
4. Service Oriented Enterprise
5. Federated SOA

Multichannel Application
SOA is a perfect fit for multichannel applications. This pattern separates the back-end business logic from the front-end logic and delivers full application functionality to a maximum number of users from various channels in a minimal amount of time while reusing the same exposed services.

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2008, more than 66% of new midsize and large interactive applications will be designed to support multichannel access, up from less than 33% in 2007.

Composite Applications
Services used in composite applications may be new service implementations, fragments of old applications that were adapted and wrapped, or combinations of the above. Two types of integration technology are essential for effective operation of a composite SOA environment: 1) integration technology behind the service interfaces, helping users wrap and adopt various pre-SOA applications; and 2) integration technology helping users assemble and monitor transactions from services.

Strategic Planning Assumption: Through 2012, the majority of SOA-style applications will be interactive composite applications.

Business Process Orchestration
Business process management (BPM) suites are the tools devoted to implementing such SOA-based multistep processing flows. The BPEL standard is often used to document the designed metadata flow model. The metadata repository ("meta-database") is used to manage the proceedings of the business process model at runtime. Some steps of the process are implemented by calling
SOA services. Other steps require human intervention.

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2009, more than 75% of SOA applications will implement some sequencing control outside of code of the service implementations, via external BPM technology.

Service Oriented Enterprise
The SOA-based enterprise model is a step beyond composite applications. Here, all applications are perceived as components of one integrated whole. No new application is created in isolation. Each application is built from reusable components that are available for use not only in their initially intended context, but also by other clients in other contexts. Essentially, the integrated composite enterprise consists not of applications, but rather business components — each an asset of the entire enterprise.

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2010, more than 85% of enterprises will have combined their application integration and SOA management tools and organizations.

Federated SOA
The fundamental idea behind federated SOA is to logically split the enterprise into semi-independent SOA domains (for example, reflecting the enterprise organization in terms of subsidiaries, Business Units or departments), each with its own specific SOA infrastructure, governance processes and SOA Center of Excellence. Domains are then federated (that is, integrated — usually, but not necessarily, after the fact — to enable inter-domain sharing of services) through appropriate interoperability infrastructure, governance processes and organizational settings. "SOA federation" is the process of enabling a federated SOA by establishing the
proper technical, governance and organizational capabilities.

Strategic Planning Assumption: Few large organizations are able to establish a singular architectural blueprint for their entire IT. The best practice is to endorse domain independence and allow them to differ in technology and architecture in exchange for agreement to synchronize interoperability protocols and transports. Mergers and acquisitions are clearly candidates for Federated SOA.


Posted by Tony Cook