Developing Realistic Approaches for Migration of Legacy Assets to SOA Environments

Abstract

Summary form only given. This tutorial outlines the basic principles of SOA based systems and discusses their potentials and challenges. The basic operations of service discovery, service composition and service invocation are outlined. The OASIS SOA-based systems development reference model is also presented. The tutorial also identifies common misconceptions that users have experienced in migrating to SOAs. SOA systems are analyzed from three perspectives: the application developer, the infrastructure developer, and the service provider. The needs and concerns of each of these participants, as well as the types of cross organizational communication patterns required for success are outlined. While there is often an emphasis on technical SOA issues, organizations need to address a far broader set of issues. These are outlined as the four pillars of SOA-based systems development. The four pillars include: alignment with overall business strategy; development of realistic SOA governance policies and procedures; Understanding of realistic contextual-based technology capabilities limitations; and recognition of the paradigm shift that SOA-based development entails. The issues of migrating legacy assets to an SOA environment are outlined. The service migration and reuse technique (SMART) is discussed. SMART is a method for making decisions on whether and how to convert legacy components to services within a specific SOA infrastructure. A case study using the method provides a real world context for its applicability. Open issues and current research topics are outlined