Being an Information Manager...

De-coupling data from its usage

One of the trends in integration architecture at the moment is the drive for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). For years we have been trying to rationalise applications and databases and time and time again we realised that with every migration we had to migrate a lot other stuff as well (like the increasing number of interfaces). Moving one application to something else would also lead to moving a lot of interfaces, reports, dashboards, you name it.

So now the idea is to hide all the complexity behind an abstraction layer. Why not publish all information via Web services, so everything below this becomes easy to replace with something else? 'All' we need to do is to describe the way want to see the information. The best way to do this is via defining a flexible data model (through an XML schema) and this is where the new trouble starts, because haven't we tried to do this before at the database level with enterprise data models? The good news is that this time we have more chance to succeed, since the middleware layer is much more flexible, since the data is not stored in the format of the schema, it is just described that way. And when needed you may even have more than one schema decribing the same information, without the need to store the data in a different way.

It looks promising, but we have a long way to go, since we only have started ...

Labels: architecture, SOA, web services, XML

posted by Evert Ruijs @ 10:59 AM