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By Clive Finkelstein Web services technology has now advanced so that functions within existing application programs and suites - as well as functions within ERP (enterprise resource planning, CRM (customer relationship management), SCM (supply chain management) and other packages - can be easily and reliably published to an intranet or the Internet for remote execution using SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. But what has been missing until now is an automated way to invoke available Web services based on business rules. This technology is now becoming available with business process management languages and tools. Until now, the term "service-oriented architecture" (SOA) has been synonymous with "Web services." I use SOA more precisely: to invoke Web services using business process management tools and languages. This is an important distinction. SOA is expected to make a significant contribution to the future of systems development technologies as indicated in the following paragraphs. Before SOA, systems development used workflow diagrams or systems flowcharts that were drawn and then printed so that relevant business logic could be coded by hand. These manually coded programs were laboriously tested and eventually deployed for execution. With SOA using business process management tools, this manual coding and testing step is bypassed. Instead, the diagrams are tested for correct logical execution using simulation methods. Once correct, these diagrams are then automatically generated as XML-based business process management languages for immediate execution. This business process management technology is a major advance in the productivity of systems development; it is as significant as the development of high-level language compilers in the late 1950s. It becomes easy to invoke Web services anywhere in the world and to execute them based on business rules. When these rules do change, the relevant logic in the diagrams is changed: these diagrams are then automatically regenerated. This promises to totally transform the way we build systems in the future from slow, error-prone manual coding to an automated discipline. It will enable enterprises to implement changed business rules in minutes or hours, rather than in months or years. Enterprises will then be able to change direction rapidly. |