Richard Soley

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business agility strategy. Repeat after me: Business. Agility. Strategy. There are so many technology-focused definitions of SOA floating around that it's difficult to remember that simple fact. SOA is focused on recognizing, precisely defining, storing, retrieving/reusing and optimizing business processes, both automated ones and human ones. If we as an industry allow SOA to mean Yet Another Integration Technology, we doom ourselves to yet another level of integration middleware, and yet more maintenance hassles caused by the brand new legacy systems we are installing today. SOA is an enterprise strategy certainly. Nevertheless, we recognize that the early champions SOA - those who recognize the enterprise value proposition - are in the IT department. As of such, SOA is wrongly shoved into the "technology box" in the press... (more)

The World Wide Web And Distributed Object Computing: A Natural Match?

A Capsule History of Active Webs The runaway success of the Web's HTML display language made everyone in the software community stop and take note. What was so exciting about this new technology? Was it the markup language itself? Couldn't be! HTML is just a stripped down version (DTD) of SGML, which has been around for a while. Was it the concept of a remote screen interface language? No, X terminals and the X protocol have been around for years. Could it be the HTTP protocol for transmitting HTML? Let's hope not. HTTP is basically a broken FTP, and that's been around for decade... (more)

Extracting UML from Legacy Applications

The operations of many large organizations rest on large applications that are characterized as "legacy." To increase flexibility or reduce costs businesses are looking to modernize these applications, for instance, via renovation, introducing an SOA architecture, or even re-implementing in a new environment. No matter which approach is taken, it's important to salvage as much knowledge and logic as possible from the legacy application. Unless the application's function is obsolete recovering functional knowledge (what does the application do?) and structural knowledge (how does ... (more)

Today's Silver Bullet Is Tomorrow's Legacy

One of the most delightful parts of my job is to travel the world, sharing the Object Management Group's vision of integrated, interoperable systems with varying sizes of audience ­ from as few as 10 people to as many as 10,000 ­ in every corner of the planet. While the travel can sometimes be grueling, it's worth it when I get a question or two after a speech that shows that someone has experienced the epiphany I myself had in 1989, when I realized that no business can be automated by software systems until the individual applications that automate individual processes are inte... (more)

What Will Come

In the swirl of events around the announcement last year of the upcoming CORBA 3.0, the attention centered on the upcoming CORBA Component Model. While CORBA has existed in some form or another as an adopted technology of the OMG's open, neutral, standards-setting process since October 1991, this year's major revision point for the first time will address a wealth of issues that point at deployment rather than interface. Let me explain. A decade ago the Object Management Group started down the road to infrastructure and end-user standards for interoperability in heterogeneous ent... (more)