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global commerce, no opportunity remains for stop-the-world migrations, and the “Sunday at
3 a.m.” cut-over opportunity is more costly than ever.
SOA represents a way to seize new business opportunities and reduce time to market by em-
bracing, rather than denying, differences in your organization. Perhaps it is not necessary to
rip out and replace these legacy applications, or throw yourself at the mercy of a vendor, sign-
ing up in desperation for their entire unified stack in the hopes that you will never again have
this kind of problem. A service-oriented architecture allows you to address your integration
needs in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, way.
An evolution toward services seeks to align the work of IT more closely with business goals
and ensure that the enterprise is responsive to change and ready to tackle new opportunities.
The problems and solutions presented in this chapter offer some prescriptive solutions with
the intention of starting you down a good road; they are subject to modification as appropriate
within your environment. The scenarios are more general and subjective than you are probably
used to seeing in a cookbook. Because SOA represents a kind of architecture, it is useful for
developers to understand the larger business context in which the services they create will op-
erate. In order to realize the benefits of SOA, and to code meaningful services that offer real
business value, any given service implementation needs to work harmoniously with defined
overarching business goals.
The recipes in this chapter do not have code-based solutions. They are presented as conceptual
challenges that apply across implementations. While it is possible for a Java developer to skip
this chapter altogether and jump into code with the next chapter, within an SOA it's very use-
ful for developers to think like architects, and vice versa. In fact, depending on the size and
structure of an organization, these roles are sometimes even collapsed altogether. Whether or
not this is the case for your organization, it is advantageous to use the recipes in this chapter
to define common terms as a foundation for the remainder of the work in this topic.
