Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Supporting Your SOA Efforts
Problem
You want to develop a set of guidelines and principles for designing and implementing your
service-oriented architecture. It should not only record the decisions you make but also serve
as an educational tool for others in your organization.
Solution
Create a reference architecture, which is a representation of your real-world implementation.
Internally, you can build on this to include a collection of roadmaps, conceptual blueprints,
guiding principles, and standards and conventions that will serve as the foundation of your
service-oriented architecture. If you have established a Center of Excellence (CoE) or SOA
Team (which is a very good idea), they will be the custodians of these resources, and will
likely be responsible for sharing them with the larger development teams for educational pur-
poses.
You could use your reference architecture documents as the cornerstone for an online resource
to aid in the education of others. This could be an internal website, wiki, or portal that estab-
lishes a single entry point into your architectural blueprints and other supporting resources.
NOTE
In April of 2008, OASIS published a document it called the “Reference Architecture for Service Ori-
ented Architecture Version 1.0.” You can read the PDF at
http://docs.oasis-open.org/soa-rm/soa-ra/
v1.0/soa-ra-pr-01.pdf
.
It is written for enterprise architects, and covers governance, social structures,
service modeling and ownership, security, and more. It's very abstract, but worth a read. You will find
many such documents online that you might want to screen and contextualize for your internal use.
Discussion
A referencearchitecture(RA), as defined within the Rational Unified Process, is a predefined
set of architectural patterns, designed and proven for use in particular business and technical
contexts, together with supporting documents that enable their use. These can grow organic-
ally from architectural documents, standards, and conventions you have in place already. But
it is useful to tailor them for SOA as appropriate.
