Our previous post referred to a paper that SOA analysts ZapThink just put out by David Linthicum. The paper (or "manual") is now downloadable from iTKO for free as well as from ZapThink .
Now, if you read last week's flurry of blogs and posts with Dave and John, et.al. about whether ESB is the bane of SOA, that is a philosophical question that makes you wonder if we see eye-to-eye with him -- but you need to vet out those kinds of practices in discussions to get to useful advice. That dialogue is what we love about blogging. We were talking about the challenges of leveraging multiple ESBs that will never go away in the largest companies and multi-vendor relationships, while Dave was simply stating that wouldn't be a best practice if you had a choice.
The manual/whitepaper: "Design & Validation in a Heterogeneous SOA" sounds like a mouthful but I found the content to be quite a good primer on service composition, and some of the ground rules to consider before using, or reusing, any particular piece of technology. Both SOA architects and the business stakeholders that are driving the practice should at least have a level set of what they are trying to accomplish, BEFORE talking shop about the merits of specific technology.
We couldn't agree more with this direction... it offers a good primer for teams who are growing their skills in SOA architecture or governance practices. Don't get locked in to one notion of SOA by a vendor or specific technology -- first compose and design around the business, plan to validate your approach as early as possible and test throughout the process, THEN rationalize what to service-enable or buy just what you really need for development and integration.
If you read this one, let us know what you "zap" think of it!
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