Business agility is the Holy Grail that all enterprises pursue. As a result, technologies that make the integration process smoother and faster are foremost in the minds of all IT executives. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is one such integration technology that is increasingly gaining more attention from buyers. This note provides information on:

Key Features of an SOA

The following section outlines some of the key technology features that must be present in a true service-oriented architecture implementation.

SOA Defined

In its simplest form, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the process of building scalable distributed systems that treat all software components as services. SOA provides the framework for independent services to interact with each other across a network. This allows a complex distributed system to be assembled quickly and cost-effectively from individual services. SOA is most commonly implemented using Web service technologies.

Software Design Fundamentals:

Let us explain and understand the following Design Terms:

1. Design Principle

2. Design Pattern

3. Design Characteristics

4. Design Paradigm

5. Design Pattern Language

6. Design Standard

7. Best Practice

Design Principle:

"Example isn't another way to teach; it's the only way" -- Albert Einstein

Patterns and pattern languages capture and formally codify good designs and best experience-based practices in a way that it is possible for others to reuse them. They successfully convey insight into common problems and their solutions. After all, common concepts, a vocabulary to describe them and a language to connect them together are the underpinnings for all disciplines and communities that practice them.

A compute cloud is a utility infrastructure. It can be an internal cloud enabled by server virtualization or it can be an external enterprise infrastructure that rents access. In this video we look at three rules for getting past the hype to assess real value. The rules are:

1.Alignment is software. It’s about the applications. IT must align with business goals and objectives. Applications are the intersection point between the strategic and operational goals of the enterprise and IT.

Here is a collection of Audio Files for free download. Podcast by Indutry experts on SOA Design and SOA Concepts. Listen to the Experts and Authors on the Subject. Hope you find it useful.

http://soaconcepts.com/?q=node/55

By Dave Chappell

Myth #1. ESB is just a new name for EAI.
While many IT architecture groups are focusing on building SOAs, they still inevitably beg the question of "how is ESB different from EAI?" An ESB is an infrastructure for building an enterprise SOA, and is capable of being used in a more general way than a conventional EAI broker. According to Forrester Research, an ESB helps enterprises obtain the value of SOA by increasing connectivity, adding flexibility that speeds change, and providing greater control over use of the important resources that it binds.

Web-oriented architectures are easier to implement and offer a similar flexibility to SOA.

By Roger Smith

CIOs and system architects find themselves stymied as they try to sledgehammer complex SOAs into their enterprises. Top-down, "if you build it, they will come" approaches to service-oriented architecture often wind up failing--sometimes spectacularly. Instead of better aligning business processes and IT departments, as was promised, too many employees remain oblivious to expensive SOA initiatives. And those optimistic ROI projections? Forget 'em.

SOA Repository Best Practice
By: John Moe, Head of Business Integration, TORI Global
Tuesday, December 8, 2009

For those of us who have been developing applications for many years (think COBOL & Assembler from the 70s and 80s), the idea of having a code library (programs and routines) is nothing new. However for the Web Services generation, this concept has taken a while to re-emerge, but has now been packaged in the form of a services registry and/or repository.