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Introduction
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SOA: Principles of Service Design
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Learning from one's mistakes is one of the most essential principles of life. As the old saying goes, "One cannot achieve success without failure." When I hear that saying I sometimes mentally append it with "…unless one happens to be lucky." While there may be some truth to this, the fact is that luck is not something we want to ever have to depend on when building service-oriented architecture. Optimistic project plans or risk assessments qualified with "…as long as we get lucky" won't have much success instilling confidence (or receiving funding).
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A personal mantra of mine that has emerged from involvement in numerous SOA projects preaches that "the key to successfully doing something is in successfully understanding what you're doing." Again, disregarding the luck factor, this philosophy is very relevant to service-oriented computing and forms the basis and purpose of this book.
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The content provided in the upcoming chapters is intended to help you become a "true" SOA professional. By that I mean someone who has a clear vision of what it means for a software program to be "service-oriented," who can speak about service-oriented computing from a real-world perspective, and who approaches the design of services with a deep insight into the dynamics behind service-orientation.
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Furthermore, such an individual requires the ability to assess options in technology, design, development, delivery, and governance—all important success factors in SOA initiatives. What this translates into for the SOA professional is a need for an increased level of judgment.
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Judgment can be seen as a combination of common sense plus a sound knowledge of whatever is being judged. In the world of SOA projects, this points to two specific areas: a need to understand service-oriented computing with absolute clarity and a need to understand your own environments, constraints, and strategic goals just as well. With this range of knowledge, you can leverage what the service-oriented computing platform has to offer in order to fulfill your strategic goals within whatever boundaries you are required to operate.
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In theory this makes sense, but there is still something important missing from this formula. Nothing helps raise the level of one's judgment more than actual experience. There's no better way to truly appreciate the strategic potential of service-oriented computing and the spectrum of challenges that come with its adoption, than to personally go through the motions of a typical enterprise SOA project. This book can't replace real-world experience, but it strives to be the next best thing.
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