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At the end of the SOA Symposium 2009 the SOA Manifesto was ready and declared. It is based on these principles.

SOA Manifesto

Service orientation is a paradigm that frames what you do. Service-oriented
architecture (SOA) is a type of architecture that results from applying service
orientation. We have been applying service orientation to help organizations
consistently deliver sustainable business value, with increased agility and
cost effectiveness, in line with changing business needs.
Through our work we have come to prioritize:

Business value over technical strategy
Strategic goals over project-specific benefits
Intrinsic interoperability over custom integration
Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
Flexibility over optimization
Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection

That is, while we value the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

source
You can watch the Announcement of the SOA Manifesto on Youtube.

The manifesto was signed and declared by: Ali Arsanjani, Grady Booch, Toufic Boubez, Paul C. Brown, David Chappell, John deVadoss, Thomas Erl, Nicolai Josuttis, Dirk Krafzig, Mark Little, Brian Loesgen, Anne Thomas Manes, Joe McKendrick, Steve Ross-Talbot, Stefan Tilkov, Clemens Utschig-Utschig, Herbjörn Wilhelmsen. Soon you can join them in signing the manifesto on soa-manifesto.org.

Update Oct. 26th
I found some blogposts of people participating in the creation of the SOA Manifesto: Clemens Utschig and Stefan Tilkov

October 22th

• arrived at the #soasym09
• there will be a reincarnation of SOA #soasym09 – @atmanes – focus on the hard work of architecture
• replaying The Exorcist at the EVIL SOA including the chanting: I cast thy out!!
• the exorcism of the Evil SOA wasn’t a pretty sight #soasym09
• Oh, and there is Good SOA Up – in an angeliclike shape and character – pure goodness #soasym09
• RT while others state cloud requires SOA… @bvanzomeren: “joe mckendrick: cloud is soa done right #soasym09″
• First blogpost from the #soasym09 http://bit.ly/2Tud0V
• Services are enterprise assets and have to be managed like these #soasym09
• is the gap between IT and Business just a reflection of the left – right brain difference? as discussed at #soasym09 . lets explore this
• Achieving process excellence “co-hosted” by IDS Scheer and Software AG #soasym09
• there hasn’t been a session #soasym09 that mentioned chaos in some shape or form #entropy !?
• feeling Appleless tweeting n blogging from #soasym09 – have to find a sponsor or budget
• Grady Booch joins us at #soasym09 via Second Life

October 22th

• another virtual keynote at #soasym09 – Dennis Wisnosky of the DoD
• Interesting session on SOA Governance by Steve Pope (AmberPoint) will check the demo at their booth #soasym09
• very lively, enthousiast session on Smart Use Cases by @aahoogendoorn #soasym09
• received a draft manuscript of the SOA with REST book by Thomas Erl ea #soasym09
• has the ESB become a commodity? #soasym09
• RT agree @bvanzomeren: interesting talk of @lindaterlouw and A d hertog about the road enterprise architecture to portal and esb #soasym09″
• The SOA Manifesto is presented at #soasym09
• RT @soasym: “Wordle of #soasym09 http://ow.ly/waEv”
• RT @atmanes: “The SOA Manifesto is complete. It will be published shortly on http://soa-manifesto.org” #soasym09

All tweets on SOA Symposium

All tweets on th SOA Symposium can be found here. As they used the #soasym09 that is…. The Wordle is available here.

In this blogspost I’ll share a few thoughts I took from the afternoons sessions at the first day of SOA Symposium 2009.

The Techie Gap

Since architects, software engineers, and the like, are seen as techies (at least from a business perspective) Jaap Schekkerman argues that there is a gap between how these two populations actually use there brain. This is considered at least one of the reasons why IT projects fail.

But first let’s take a step back. Architecture is about:

• Style
• Functions – including aspects like adaptabillity and usefulness
• Construction – including aspects like durability and maintenance

Business people having a dominant right brain style are mostly interested in Style, and sometimes in Functions. On the other hand, architects – being mostly on the left brain dominant side of the scale – seem to have a sweet spot for Construction. This sometimes expands to Functions.
Where right brainers favor “the broad picture”, and left brainers have an analytical “brain for details” (would have used heart, but feeling don’t seem to be their thing). There comes a gap because of different interests in their communication.

A solution for smaller projects to bridge the gap is limit both scope and depth in meetings, and other interactions between these groups.

A more profound solution that is given by Jaap Schekkerman is to use a “Real Enterprise Architect”. Where he defines the role of an Enterprise Architect as:

To be a business and IT communicator.

A person in this role as he sees it has a very broad set of skills and capabilities.

Fundamentals never go out of style – Grady Booch

Grady Booch was very kind to join us via Second Life at a time that he would normally be sleeping (OK; it is an assumption from my side that he would love to sleep at 04:00 in the morning). Fortunately he still managed to give a interesting keynote.

Here are some quotes that I recognised from my own experience:

All architecture is design; not all design is architecture.

Architecture is about all the decisions that are made during a creation process. In this process thousands of small and larger choices are made. It is easy to see, how this can lead to the following:

Most architectures are accidently; Some architectures are intentionally.

With these statements in the back of our head it is good to see that fundamentals keep offering solutions. Here are some classics that can give you guidance:

• Use crisp abstractions
• Aim at a clear separation of concerns
• Distribute responsabilities
• Simplicity is the key

There were some great sessions on the first morning of the 2009 edition of the SOA Symposium. One that is again dedicated to “substance only”. The keynotes of Thomas Erl and Anne Thomas Manes basically went on where the blogpost ended, and declared “SOA is dead, long live Services”. Most people forgot to read the last part of that statement. At the same time we’ll see that Architecture will play a main role in Next Generation SOA.

The New SOA is all about Architecture.

If we are not going to use the architectural principals and patterns, we won’t be able to “clean the house”. This will leave us with the same problems as we had before… only now they have a SOA sauce on top of them. Business is not interested in this somewhat technology flavored sauce. And that is what makes it hard to sell SOA to the business!

Exorcism of the bad SOA

Before we can go to the new and improved SOA, we have to lose the old one. So a real “exorcism” based on the movie was held, as a ritual to leave the past behind. This left us with the question what the New Good SOA will look like. Here are some clues:

• SOA is something you DO, not something you buy – which is not the easiest statement with al these vendors around
• SOA doesn’t have to be large scale – This will take away some of the burdens of the enterprise wide scope, that has difficulty with timely delivery and showing business value within a reasonable time.
• It is about business value – Leaving us with the question how to measure the value of a paradigm? One of the answers lies in the search for metrics for the values of (business) Services.

A lot of other possible buzz words – Cloud, BPM, SaaS, and Mashup – depend on the success of the Good SOA. This will leave SOA a prerequisite for the future.

As I recently blogged the book Getting Started With Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 – A Hands-On Tutorial has my interest. Last week my copy arrived.

In a blogpost Clemens Utschig writes about this book:

Heidi and her team have done a tremendous job to structure the labs and hands-on exercises in a didactic, explanatory way – with solutions all the way through. This way the book serves not just as a tutorial, but also as a reference bible when it comes to implementation of specific features and concepts.

Being familiar with the labs and hands-on for the SOA Suite from the earlier versions up to 11g R1, and having read the first four chapters, I agree with Clemens. It is a good tutorial, and learning path that includes some great tips on how to overcome the pitfalls you could run into.

SOA Suite 11gR1 Book resources

To get an impression of the book you can download a sample chapter here (pdf). There aren’t any errata (yet).

Artifacts for the tutorial part are available for download. An overview of the required software can be found on the Release Downloads for Oracle SOA Suite pages of OTN. These include the link for download.

Recently there was a small survey in the company that employs me. The questions boiled down to the Twitter question:

What are you doing?

or what have you been doing during the last year. Since this question was aimed at architects, it should give some insight in the diversity of tasks for the various types of architects. Reading the results there were two conclusions to be drawn:

Architects have an even more diverse job than I imagined

Here are some examples:

• “Translate” a technical complex strategic document to a message we can communicate;
• Write a strategic information plan;
• Give an impact analysis of the projected move to open source for our company;
• Write a functional design based on requirements;
• Define an action plan to get our 3th SOA project into production ASAP;
• Define a project start architecture;
• Implement an enterprise wide Single Sign On and provisioning solution;
• Create a mobile application based on MS technology;
• Reduce storage costs;
• Deliver a Proof of Concept/Technology;
• Give the arguments: Service Bus or not?

My advice:

next time someone tells you that she needs an architect on the project, you immediately ask what kind of questions this “role” has to answer.

The way questions are answered is even more diverse

The answers of my colleagues were very different on various dimensions. First of all the length of the answers, where some of them needed a few sentences, others elaborated using several pages. Some mentioned technology others didn’t – even when the question was tempting them.
Another difference was that some gave the customers question or assignment, and others answered describing their approach to get to the result. A few grabbed the opportunity to promote themselves stating awards they received, and presentations they held on important boards.

Once again this proves to me: Question and answer can never be separated from context, and who is answering the question.

October 22-23 the SOA Symposium 2009 will be hosted in the World Trade Center – Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Besides the Second Annual International SOA Symposium, the International Cloud Symposium will be launched at the same time, as a bonus co-located conference. There will be over 80 speakers including recognized thought leaders, such as Thomas Erl, Grady Booch, Anne Thomas Manes, Joe McKendrick, David Chappell, Dirk Krafzig, Jim Webber, Nicolai Josuttis, Paul Brown, Mark Little, Clemens Utschig, and Torsten Winterberg.

The theme of the symposium – Next Generation SOA – is explained by Thomas Erl in SOA Magazine of April 2009 :

Next Generation SOA represents how the evolution of service-oriented computing has reached a point where we have not just mature technology platforms and sophisticated modern service technology innovations at our disposal, but also proven practices, patterns, principles, and a clear vision of the target state represented by service-oriented computing.

During the symposium the latest title – Next Generation SOA: A Real-World Guide to Modern Service-Oriented Computing – in The Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series will be launched.

SOA Manifesto announcement

This event is chosen by leading SOA experts as the location at which the SOA Manifesto will be finalized and, for the first time, announced. The SOA Manifesto is:

A formal declaration of the principles, intentions and ambitions of service-orientation and the service-oriented architectural model.

This announcement will be video recorded and the video file, along with the first draft of the SOA Manifesto, will be published on this site. The final manifesto may be entitled the “Next Generation SOA Manifesto”. Which perfectly fits the theme of the SOA Symposium.

Will we meet there?

I would like to meet you there. Use this site to register. Note that several partners of 10% discount (Oracle, Via Nova Architectura, and DNV).
If you won’t be able to make it, follow this blog. There will be several posts during the event.

Last years resources

In the meantime you can use last years resources and visit the 2008 presentations on slideshare.