SOA Services

In This Section:

Service Enablement

The first level of maturity in SOA implementation is Service Enablement. In this phase, you break your application infrastructure into modular components to form the building blocks of your SOA. Many of your components may already be modular (especially MQ, JMS, FTP, and HTTP applications) so this may simply be a matter of formalizing the interface definitions. Other applications may require several method calls or CICS transactions be assembled to form a single Service module.

In addition to being modular, Services in an SOA should be “accept and return” self-defining data structures (like XML) and use standards based protocols (like JMS) wherever it is practical. This may mean adding wrappers around some existing application components to give them such standards based interfaces. Note: if you find you are doing too much of this, you may be ready for SOA level 2 – building an Enterprise Service Bus.

Service Enablement deliverables:

  • A document describing policies and procedures for service definition including Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents as well as metadata for services beyond the scope of WSDL.
  • Formalization of service definitions for existing Services as WSDL files where practical or according to internal metadata standards where out of scope for WSDL.
  • Development of Composite Service Assemblies exposing sets of non-modular calls (e.g. CICS transactions or method invocations) as modular Services.
  • Code and interface definitions for new Services where applicable.
  • Training plans for developers and architects dealing with SOA.
  • The MQSoftware Consultant will provide knowledge transfer related to Service Development to your architects, project managers, and developers.

Service Enablement prerequisites:

  • A defined scope for service enablement and descriptions of existing and proposed business applications being integrated into the SOA within this engagement.
  • Architects and project managers are available for project planning and knowledge transfer.

Duration: Highly variable according to project scope. 1 week to 6 months dependent upon the size of the implementation. Approximately two service definitions per week with up to one week of initial overhead for policy establishment and documentation.