I’ll be moderating a panel next week, at OSBC, on open source’s role in SOAs. As the description says:
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the rage of the industry today. With the strong focus on open standards that promote interoperability, open source is extremely well poised to be the real secret sauce behind the SOA revolution. In this panel we will examine the impact of open source on SOA and how key open source infrastructure vendors are positioning their offerings to become the market leaders of the SOA platform. We’ll also hear from early adopter enterprises to hear how they view the open source & SOA opportunity.
Most of the questions I have at the moment revolve around simply defining what an SOA is and (more interestingly to me) is not. As I see it, what’s interesting about open source and SOAs is that open source based SOAs tend to be much more pragmatic and modest; this versus the “SOA will save the day” hoopla you might expect from mega-SOA pitches.
The panelests come from a mixed technology and customer base, so I’m looking forward to simply finding out what SOAs in the real world look like to them.
That said, I wanted to get input and questions from you, dear readers. What would you ask the panel? What general topics are you interested in?
1: Under what circumstances is it OK for SOA to have absolutely no security?
2: Under what circumstances is it OK for SOA to have zero user identification?
3: Give an example of something that can be part of SOA without any XML capabilities.
4: Can something be considered part of an SOA architecture if its response time is greater than 1 second? And is not asynchronous?
5: Can SOA contain components that only interact with one other system, and does not talk through the BUS?
6: Can something be still considered an SOA if there is no computer-capable service-discovery?
7: Is it OK for SOA to be entirely URL-based and rely on DNS exclusively for service connection? or does it need more?
8: Can a SOA span firewalled sections easily?
9: Can a SOA include proxy servers?
10: Can a SOA component work as a unix program and be piped?
Example: $ soaservice("get_data") | soaservice("transformdata") | soaservice(encode_data) > out.txt
And in response to that list of questions: is SOA a technological construct, or a business one?
(and in case you didn't see the Tweet: how do open source softwares like ServiceMix/Mule stack up to Sonic/Cape Clear/Tibco etc in terms of what might be important to enterprise customers?)