Red Hat Acquires SOA Modeler


Web Services are not synonymous with SOA . At least that’s the
opinion of Thomas Erl, a leading service-oriented architecture (SOA) expert
and author of several books on SOA.


Erl who is also the founder of SOA Systems, has gone to great lengths trying
to educate about what SOA is and how to actually model solutions. He has
designed a tool called the SOA Service Modeler that is being given to Red
Hat to develop and open source.


“There is a real need to have some support for the specialized service-oriented analysis service modeling process that is required in a typical SOA
delivery lifecycle to precede the physical design and development process
that comes thereafter,” Erl explained to internetnews.com. “This is a
tool that is specifically designed to accommodate service modeling.”


The tool has only been designed by Erl and is not yet built. Erl has given
over the patent rights to the SOA Modeler in the hopes that it can spur SOA
adoption and development. According to Erl, there were no financial
considerations from Red Hat as part of the SOA modeler intellectual property
donation.


“What the invention does is help us to give to our customers some key
technology that, when implemented, should simplify the development and
management of services,” Mark Little, technical development manager for
Red Hat’s SOA platform, told internetnews.com. “This will go into open
source so it’ll have a fairly wide audience.”


The SOA Modeler is intended to solve what both Red Hat and Erl see as a
common flaw in the way that SOA is currently perceived. That is, Web Services
is the same thing as SOA.


“In terms of obstacles that we see with SOA, the No. 1 issue is a lack
of clarity about what SOA as an architectural model and service orientation
as a design paradigm actually are,” Erl said. “The key success factor to
SOA is understanding service orientation. Lack of clarity is what I’ve seen
inhibit most SOA projects.”


The WSDL (Web Services Description Language) is a key element
of Web Services that describes a particular service’s capabilities. WSDL,
though important for Web services, isn’t a necessary part of SOA according to
Erl.

He explained that this SOA Service Modeler has no direct connection to
WSDL. But it does allow for the definition of the service contract regardless
of whether you implement the service contract in a Web service with a WSDL or a Java component with its own technical interface.


“We’re not Web-services specific, and we’ve been trying to put as much
distance between developers and WSDL as possible, because although it may
make sense for Web services, it doesn’t make sense for services that are
using JMS or other transports,” Red Hat’s Little said.

“People tie SOA to
Web services, which is completely wrong. You can develop non-SOA applications
with Web services just as easy as you can in any other distributed
environment.”


The goal of the SOA Modeler according to Little is to help fix the
perception and make it easier for people to think about developing SOA
without actually getting down into the implementation details.


Red Hat is expected to roll out its next JBoss SOA platform by the end of
October.

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