The emergence of Web services will force developers to change the style of their development efforts in a dramatic shift to a new style of computing solution.
The emergence of Web services (as evidenced by recent Web services announcements by Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems) has confirmed Gartner's expectation that service-oriented architecture (SOA) would eventually be coupled with service-oriented development (see Research Notes COM-10-1033, "E-Services: Are They Really The Next 'E'?" and COM-12-0101, "Web Services and Software E-Services: What's in a Name?"). The combination results in what Gartner refers to as service-oriented development of applications (SODA). This concept encompasses the necessary evolution of enterprises, tools and development strategies to enable successful development of services-based applications — that is, Web services.
Web services have many implications for applications development (AD). For example, integrated services environments (ISEs) will be one of the mechanisms supporting SODA (see Research Note SPA-12-9819, "The Integrated Service Environment Emerges"). These next-generation environments will provide the necessary tools to create, assemble and deploy Web services, in much the same way that applications are deployed today through integrated development environments (IDEs) and integrated application environments (IAEs). In addition, the creation and assembly of services instead of lower-level components will enable the emergence of a new breed of developer that is more focused on the business process flow within an application than the lines of code or the "glue" that holds the components together. This is a major opportunity for developers to directly leverage new code along with pre-existing logic to build true composite applications. The SODA developer will "snap" services together using XML as a means of bridging the gaps between application modules — as if the developer were attaching together pieces of Velcro. The difference between "gluing" components and "snapping" services together will be in increased flexibility. This will enable the enterprise to reconfigure business process logic much more quickly than in the past. Flexibility is a basic necessity to support an agile enterprise.
Since SODA is a development concept that mirrors SOA deployment concepts, it represents an important factor in the success of Web services as a whole. Design-time and run-time activities must be associated with one another through complementary concepts. One without the other is not enough. For example, component-based development is mirrored by component models for deployment, and client/server deployment is mirrored by rapid applications development in AD. On the other hand, the deployment model of Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) failed partially because there was no corresponding development concept to go along with it. SODA is the mirror concept to Web services architecture and SOA. Services-oriented development subsumes object- and component-oriented development because these lower-level concepts support the underlying mechanisms for building and deploying systems. Enterprises can (and should) use objects or components to build services.
SODA includes the following concepts (among others):
The idea of SOA (the mirror concept to SODA) has shown promise for years. Most CORBA applications are SOA applications, and many application integration projects are SOA projects. However, all of the aforementioned SOA projects were created by Type A leading-edge enterprises. Mainstream enterprise projects continued to crank out monolithic applications due to the lack of tools available to aid in the definition, look-up, maintenance and implementation of services. Web services move beyond traditional SOA; SODA promotes tools for Web services that are easy to use and packed with functionality that allows an average developer to create useful, usable services. When such tools do emerge (as ISEs), SOA (through Web services) will become mainstream and the overall quality of the software industry will significantly improve. This is the value proposition of SODA.
The ideal platform environment for Web services will be one that supports a programming model centered around service interfaces and designed for a loosely coupled transaction topology. The platform will support the coexistence and cooperation of services, Web services and the underlying components. It will also have a repository of service interfaces, a search engine for locating required services, a choice of service invocation options, and a programming environment that distinguishes the service design from the design of components and the design of the service-consuming client applications. The tools will automate version control for services and help design new services via a composition of flow-through existing services. The environment will focus on messages as the format of service communications while still supporting the tightly coupled request/reply programming model.
Bottom Line: Gartner believes that the emergence of Web services and SODA is essential to making the agile enterprise a reality. Without SODA, efforts to bring SOA to the mainstream will fail. Web services represent a potential advance toward greater maturity for the entire software industry. Enterprises must begin to focus AD efforts on developing a services-oriented culture for building new applications by testing ISEs and standards that support Web services (i.e., SOAP, XML and Web Services Description Language). The benefit is that what used to be done by a few leading-edge developers will become a mass-market commonplace practice.
Source: Gartner's Internet Strategies Commentary COM-12-9640, 8 February 2001, D. Plummer.
SODA also includes ideas that examine the level of developer that will do the work, what integration means and at what level it is performed, where processes will be modeled and by whom, and how testing and security will be done in a service model vs. a traditional model. Many of these questions are already being addressed minutely in SOA research, but only at the level of deployment-oriented concepts.
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