How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized in such a way that you can browse and easily find topics of interest. The chapters themselves address specific domains of concern about SOA in the business/IT world, as follows:

Chapter 1, “SOA Basics”—This chapter defines SOA and service orientation. It also examines several myths and misconceptions that prevail in the marketplace about SOA.

Chapter 2, “Business”—This chapter examines the forces that drive businesses in all industries to become more agile, adaptable, responsive, resilient, and profitable. The chapter covers how to address the business value of SOA, sell SOA to business stakeholders, and the return on investment of SOA. This chapter also covers business process management (BPM).

Chapter 3, “Organization”—This chapter discusses the technology and organizational roadblocks that impede forward motion in SOA adoption. The chapter also examines the relationships between business and IT and how they collaborate for SOA.

Chapter 4, “Governance”—This chapter addresses the hot topic of governance, including why it is important and its impact on achieving business results with SOA adoption. The chapter answers questions about governance, adoption steps, how to get started, and how to communicate the SOA journey.

Chapter 5, “Methods”—This chapter addresses questions on methods, both business and system. Service granularity and identification of services are also covered in this chapter.

Chapter 6, “Applications”—This chapter distinguishes between applications and composite applications and identifies what changes about applications as a result of SOA.

Chapter 7, “Architecture”—This chapter considers architecture from various views (for example, application architecture, integration architecture, and enterprise architecture) and discusses the impact the various views and their interrelationships with SOA.

Chapter 8, “Information”—This chapter covers how information, data architecture, and management support SOA. Concepts addressed in this chapter include information as a service, canonical models, and message models.

Chapter 9, “Infrastructure”—This chapter covers the middleware and operating environment required for SOA. Topics addressed include the enterprise service bus, registries, operational impacts of SOA, and the required operational maturity of the infrastructure to support SOA.

Chapter 10, “Future”—The last chapter of this book deals with the future of SOA. Where is it and where is it going? Is SOA dead? Isn’t cloud computing the replacement and our next horizon? What is meant by context-aware services?