Thomas Erl is the world’s top-selling SOA author and Series Editor of the Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl (www.soabooks.com). With over 100,000 copies in print worldwide, his books have become international bestsellers and have been formally endorsed by senior members of major software organizations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, BEA, Sun, Intel, SAP, CISCO, and HP. His most recent titles - SOA Design Patterns and Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA - were co-authored with a series of industry experts and follow his first three books Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services, Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design, and SOA Principles of Service Design. Thomas is currently working with over 20 authors on a number of upcoming titles, including SOA Governance, SOA with .NET, SOA with Java, ESB Architecture for SOA, and SOA with REST. He is also overseeing the SOAPatterns.org initiative, a community site dedicated to the on-going development of SOA patterns. Thomas is the founder of SOA Systems Inc. (www.soasystems.com), a company specializing in vendor-neutral SOA consulting and training services. He is also the founder of the internationally recognized SOA Certified Professional program (www.soacp.com and www.soaschool.com). Thomas is a speaker and instructor for private and public events and is regularly invited to Gartner summits. He has delivered many workshops and keynote speeches, and is on the program committee for the International SOA Symposium. Articles and interviews by Thomas have been published in numerous publications, including SOA World Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and CIO Magazine. For more information, visit www.thomaserl.com.
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 contrac...May. 21, 2009 01:30 PM EDT Reads: 1,637
A service inventory is a living body of services that individually will need the freedom to evolve independently over time. What we learned when documenting the SOA design pattern catalog is that there are patterns that emerged not only at design-time but also during this post-implemen...
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. When designing data architectures, you can easi...
The internationally acclaimed book "SOA Design Patterns" (Erl et al., ISBN: 0136135161, Prentice Hall, 2009) documents a catalog of 85 patterns and is the latest title in the “Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl” (www.soabooks.com). Thomas Erl, the world’s t...
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 o...
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 attenti...
Originally inspired by techniques used to design buildings and cities, and popularized by the Gang of Four during the mainstream emergence of object-orientation, design patterns have seen us through the various shifts in architecture, technology, and, of course, design. Pattern catalog...
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. We caught up with him to ask him to share some of the insights he gained from his work with SOA...
Many are comparing notes on two well-publicized paths to achieving SOA. The bottom-up approach is currently the most common variety, where Web services are created on an 'as need' basis to fulfill mostly integration-related requirements. These services are typically application specifi...
