Service Oriented Architectures
Large-scale applications are complex to develop and to live with. The key to simplifying them and living with them is to create modular, flexible systems. However this isn't easy. ThoughtWorks has extensive, proven experience of developing large-scale systems that live and evolve with the businesses that host them.
Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are widely recognized as a pattern for modular, flexible and scalable solutions. Unfortunately they are also widely hyped as silver bullets, and as reasons to buy expensive middleware to support them.
SOA systems are difficult to do well, and the technologies surrounding them do not deliver any silver bullets, though they do make some new techniques available to the experienced development team. The principal issue for developers of SOA systems is, as always, the creation of effective interfaces between services that keep them loosely-coupled, thereby maintaining flexibility in use.
ThoughtWorks' approach to SOA is to align services within a SOA on business boundaries and to model the interactions between services on business interactions. We design interfaces between services in the context of specific real interactions from the perspective of clients of the service. Together these techniques result in interfaces between services that are designed to fulfil specific tasks, but because they are designed from the perspective of the client, hide the detail of how the service achieves its task.
From our perspective, good design, rather than technology choice, is the determinant of successful SOA.
SOA is an approach that is common to many of our projects, whether they are specifically "SOA" projects or not. These projects range in complexity from the implementation of a single service to the creation of SOA systems that provide the information infrastructure for entire businesses.
ThoughtWorks delivers world-class solutions using the relevant techniques and technologies on a daily basis.
by Dave Farley, ThoughtWorks Architect
ThoughtWorks is a global IT consultancy. We deliver bespoke applications, no-nonsense consulting and help organisations become agile.
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