Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 14. SOA Software Development

In This Chapter

• Building SOA services

• The SOA application life cycle

• New software tools for SOA

• SOA and BPM

• SOA and software testing

A lot of this book focuses on how a SOA behaves when it's gainfully employed running business processes. Now, we're going to talk about building SOA services so that you can get all excited and get to work!

But don't get concerned. We aren't going to say much about programming languages, scripting languages, job control, compilers, linkers, interpreters, or code tracers. All that we need to say about such programmer tools is that in the world of SOA, they continue to exist. And the people who know and love them will continue to know and love them because they will continue to be needed for quite a while yet. The considerable skills of these talented souls are focused on all that fundamental code stuff buried deep within the enterprise system, and there's still going to be a lot of nitty, gritty, gnarly, intricate code to write for some time to come. But under SOA, all this kind of programming belongs under the heading of "plumbing" — that is, programming that business people and applications programmers can joyfully ignore. SOA sits atop the plumbing. Plumbing is not its job.

We characterize SOA as an architecture that separates the plumbing from business services, as indeed it is. But when you first adopt SOA, there is no single switch you can flip that magically separates these two aspects of software that in fact have ...