Friday, February 10, 2006

SOA & Reap: A Brave New WebWorld

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is the now and future of web application development. SOA is about exposing webservices for consumption and interaction and the hot skills are building integrations.

A SOA expert, who works specifically with WebMethods, a business integration tool (correct me here, I am new to using this jargon) says that the biggest institutions will be busy building and exposing webservices and the smaller ones will be working to integrate with them. A very simplistic view of a really vast field, for starters.

Google's Map API and Amazon's Book Lookup API are probably examples. How will it pan out in higher education? Central administrative services consumed by distributed units is one application and is probably being done in a highly custom mode by coding specialists working to integrate legacy and current systems.

What might be services for the richmedia library? Content, yes. Metadata, more so. Something that is not available for low cost, being made available to the masses. We'll see how this churns and turns.

What are the hot SOA products?
WebMethods
WebSphere etc.

Although this information may not be news to people already working in ERP/CRM, this was news to me, learning about the expanse and intensity of implementations this consultant friend of mine has been through in the last 4 years: from government to education, to publishers to retail, from network solution providers to healthcare... he's seen and done it all in the field of WebMethods.




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