Taking applications to the next step

Returning to favor The network application platform Maximizing code reuse Designing for networks Looking ahead

Not every effort at standardization catches on - more than a century of lobbying has done little to spur metric system adoption in the U.S., for example. But sometimes conditions are ripe for new ideas.

In the world of business applications, standards-based efforts are gaining momentum. Web services implementations are growing as users migrate to the middleware that enables and simplifies Web application-to-application connectivity. In addition, users are warming to the idea of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to connect applications across a network in a way that fosters code sharing and reuse.

The technologies have a symbiotic relationship: Web services can be deployed in an SOA. Together they constitute the next incarnation of enterprise applications, which experts say will act as loosely coupled, modular network services that developers can link to create complex business processes without much custom coding.

The move to a less brittle, more flexible distributed application model complements similar efforts to distribute server and network resources in data centers. "The common theme is virtualization," says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink. "Storage virtualization handles storage, grid computing virtualizes processor power. A services-oriented architecture essentially virtualizes software application functionality."

Returning to favor

The current SOA buzz isn't indicative of a new technology, but rather the next iteration of an old concept. Earlier attempts at popularizing SOAs - such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture - were hindered by a lack of standard middleware and APIs. Web services might be the missing link that brings SOAs mainstream, observers say. "The reality is this might be the right time for us to be thinking about loosely coupled distributed computing, in part because of the movement to do it based on standards as opposed to proprietary integration technologies," says Ron Schmelzer, another ZapThink senior analyst. "At the same time, there's enough infrastructure in the IT environment - application servers and whatnot - that we can actually afford to implement Web services and SOAs without having to build a Big Bang kind of project."

Additionally, as companies tackle new data center initiatives aimed at maximizing use of IT resources, they have to consider how these distributed computing projects mesh with applications. For example, from an application perspective, technologies such as grid computing depend on having location-independent services, Schmelzer says. "The system won't work if it requires that one application, running on one server, be available. Services have to be distributed, and the only way to make that work in a grid capacity is to implement an SOA."

An SOA doesn't replace existing infrastructure, Schmelzer says. Rather, it serves as a layer on top of application servers and databases in multi-tiered or client-server architectures, he says. "SOAs provide networked, location-independent services that are themselves just interfaces to other systems."