Welcome!

Thomas Erl

Subscribe to Thomas Erl: eMailAlertsEmail Alerts
Get Thomas Erl via: homepageHomepage mobileMobile rssRSS facebookFacebook twitterTwitter linkedinLinkedIn


Top Stories by Thomas Erl

It's always good to get an idea of the big picture before diving into the details of any technology-centric topic. For this reason, we'll take the time to briefly mention the overarching goals and benefits associated with service-oriented computing as they relate to Web Service contract design. Because these goals are strategic in nature, they are focused on long-term benefit - a consideration that ties into both the design and governance of services and their contracts. An understanding of these long-term benefits helps provide a strategic context for many of the suggested techniques and practices in this guide. Here's the basic list of the goals and benefits of service-oriented computing: Increased Intrinsic Interoperability Increased Federation Increased Vendor Dive... (more)

SOA Pattern of the Week (#1): Service Façade

One of the fundamental goals when designing service-oriented solutions is to attain a reduced degree of coupling between services, thereby increasing the freedom and flexibility with which services can be individually evolved. Achieving the right level of coupling "looseness" is most often considered a design issue that revolves around the service contract and the consumer programs that ... (more)

SOA Pattern of the Week (#4): Service Normalization

Like data normalization, the Service Normalization pattern is intent on reducing redundancy and waste in order to avoid the governance burden associated with having to maintain and synchronize similar or duplicate bodies of service logic." You can see it introduces the Pattern on our publisher page. When designing data architectures, you can easily end up with different databases or even... (more)

SOA Pattern of the Week (#2): Non-Agnostic Context

Should a service only be considered a service if it's reusable? The answer to this question, as asserted by this pattern, is a firm "no." While agnostic services (services providing multi-purpose logic with reuse potential, as per the Agnostic Context pattern), receive the most attention during service modeling and design phases, it can often be short-sighted to focus only on agnostic se... (more)

Exclusive SOA Web Services Journal Briefing – Thomas Erl On SOA

With the unwavering prominence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) there is an increasing interest in understanding what exactly it means for something to be considered "service-oriented." Thomas Erl recently completed a lengthy research project for SOA Systems Inc. into the origins of SOA and the current state of service-orientation among all primary SOA technology platforms. This bo... (more)