程阳：How should we look at SOA?

SOA can be looked at in terms of three core areas:

• A management perspective where IT architects deal with IT process governance, SOA processes, business and IT convergence.
• An architectural framework whereby business requirements are identified and help to define architectural governance and their specifications.
• A deployment framework whereby operational infrastructures, service management, standards and policies are designed and mapped.
  

These three main concepts provide all the necessary steps towards a successful implementation giving architects a thread from the design / modeling stages down to the daily execution and activity monitoring.

All these elements combined provide the Best Practice into achieving total business agility. Policies can therefore be defined whilst taking into account compliance, standards and policies to make the implementation across into IT simple, successful and highly cost effective.

Casewise has placed a strong focus on SOA framework by providing full support for the Enterprise Architecture of SOA and SOA governance.

The Casewise Service Oriented Architecture Accelerator provides a fully mapped insight into the comprehensive SOA standards world by providing an overview of the enterprise services model and application development environment within an SOA approach. It also can highlight all the necessary guidance on how to approach, use and catalog the services available within the enterprise.

By using a Service Oriented Architecture Accelerator approach, architects are able to deliver business oriented application solutions with greater speed and flexibility. The service oriented solutions produced result in lower lifecycle costs to customers and increased ROI.

By bridging the gap between design and operations, the SOA Accelerator utilizes the Casewise BPEL interface in which designs can be transformed in to the execution language bridging the Enterprise Architect and Technical Architect’s worlds for faster and more effective deployment.

This concept of a services layer is one of the most important concepts within any SOA infrastructure and is based on the principals of :

Channel neutrality – deployment of the same service but into different channels
Reusability – whereby Architects can reuse the software functionality by different business processes.

Replaceability – this defines the ability to replace the software components with others providing the same functionality without losing the software service. This service layer reflects specific business processes that take advantage of the defined business processes whilst abstracting the consumer from the complexity of the implementations.