deltalounge

The agenda for the SOA Symposium 2010 has been posted. Again there are very interesting sessions during this 2 day conference. The largest and most comprehensive in the field of SOA and Cloud Computing. The Real World SOA Case Studies track offers a great opportunity to learn from the experience of others. In this track you will find:

Real-life accounts of successful and failed SOA projects discussed first-hand by those that experienced the project lifecycles and have a story to tell. These veteran practitioners will provide advice and insights regarding challenges, pitfalls, proven practices, and general project information that demonstrates the intricacies of implementing and governing service-oriented solutions in the real world.

I will be presenting the first session in this track on Using a Service Bus to Connect the Supply Chain. If you have any topics or questions in advance that you think I should address, please post them in the comments. Hope to meet you in Berlin.

On October 5 and 6 2010 the worlds largest SOA and Cloud Computing event will be held in Berlin; the SOA Symposium. The International SOA and Cloud Symposium brings together lessons learned and emerging topics from SOA and Cloud projects, practitioners and experts.

There is a call for presentations:

The SOA and Cloud Symposium 2010 program committees invite submissions on all topics related to SOA and Cloud, including but not limited to those listed in the preceding track descriptions. While contributions from consultants and vendors are appreciated, product demonstrations or vendor showcases will not be accepted.

All submissions must be received no later than June 30, 2010. An overview of the tracks can be found here. Other resources:

• My blogpost of the SOA Symposium 2009.
• Presentations from 2009.

Few days ago a colleague published an interesting blogpost on jBPM, JPA, and Hibernate. The post was noticed by Tom Baeyens, who until late March 2010 was the project lead for jBPM at JBoss.
Of course JBoss restates their commitment to advancing the jBPM project, but it will be very interesting to see what will come from Tom Baeyens’s new initiative…

For me it is great to see the benefits of principles like reuse outside of IT. In this post i’ll share another example. Recently I read an article (in Dutch) on the success of Audi. Audi managed to keep up it’s sales even during 2009 (Annual Report 2009 PDF Alert 16MB!). Audi delivered 949,729 (compared to 1,003,469 in 2008) cars to customers worldwide in 2009. Sales were thus only 5.4 percent down on the record level of 2008 (source).

Besides innovation it is said in the Dutch magazine Management Team that reuse is one of the driving forces. It is great to have another example of how the principles behind Service Orientation not only deliver value in IT but also – or probably mainly – for the business when applied e.g. in other engineering disciplines.

Reusable building blocks

Audi has limited the number of modules engineer are allowed to use to construct a new model. There are two main lines, based on how the engine is placed:

• Modulare Querbaukastensystem – transverse engine platform
• Modulare Längsbaukastensystem – longitudinal engine platform

Limiting the number of construction modules for engines, gearboxes, air conditioning results in several benefits:

• Lower costs per car compared to it’s competitors.
• Serve a larger number of niche markets compared to the competition.
• Shortened time-to-market.
• At production lines both employees and robots can work on several models. This enables Audi to produce the models that are in demand, while at the same time keeping a high utilization rate.

Audi claims to save 20% per manufactured car, and to save 30% on the development of new models. The economies of scale are further leveraged because of the reuse of components in the Volkswagen Group.

First a short note on both BPMN and BPEL. BPMN is a modeling notation for business processes. OMG on it’s BPMN pages puts it:

The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes.

BPEL is an execution language. There is for example no standard graphical notation in the BPEL standard. The main focus is not on readability, it is on execution.
So BPMN and BPEL aim for different goals. It should come as no surprise that there is gap. There are several resources that describe the mapping, provide translation, or transforming BPMN to BPEL.

Guidelines

Here are some guidelines that help you bridge the BPMN to BPEL gap:

• Be as specific as possible in BPMN diagrams (In Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite you can use e.g. automated activity, notification , and human tasks.).
• Add additional information in BPMN activities. Sure this doesn’t enable automatic transformation, but it does reduce the need for additional design documentation. This will improve documentation consistency, and reduce the required governance.
• Use templates in your BPMN activities. Structure and check completeness of your descriptions.
• Use a Service repository. This will enable both designers and developer to communicate about “the same thing”
• Use a GUI components reposity, for the same reasons as you use a Service repository

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Today I give a presentation at the Oracle NL 25 years event – Celebrating a tradition in innovation. Although there are a lot of pictures the words are in Dutch, as was the language of the audience…
The story is based around practises developed in the last five years working on SOA projects. Despite all the desillusions on SOA projects that get a lot of attention this year, good results are achieved for our customers using these practises and guidelines. I’ll elaborate on them in future blogposts.

Still searching for the correct answer on the question: What skyline is in the picture on slide 12?

In the SOA still dead blogpost based on his impression of the SOA Symposium 2009, Joe McKendrick asks the question:

Is SOA still dead?

My personal opinion is that SOA is still alive or reanimated. The declaration of the SOA Manifesto has contributed to this. The least it has done is start discussion online and offline. These discussions will lead to a better understanding for the participants and those following them. The result will be more mature and successful (in business terms not technology) SOA implementations. This would be quite an achievement if the statistics that Anne Thomas Manes presented are accurate:

fewer than 10% of companies have seen significant business value in their SOA efforts.

Although the quotes on this page seem rather negative, I’m still an optimist on the case for SOA. It brings us solid principles and guidance in developing software of better quality.

Views on the SOA Symposium

The proclamation of the SOA Manifesto has resulted in most of the blogpost on the SOA Symposium. However there are post dedicated to a broader spectrum of the SOA Symposium. These give an impression or reflect back on things.

Reading the blog of Linda Terlouw, I remembered having the same expectations on the “Service-Oriented Solution Evaluation Criteria” session: some info on how you can measure whether or not (or to which extent) a service conforms to certain principles. Instead it was a summary of the principles as they are defined by Thomas Erl.

Comments, like this one, are appreciated.

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.