To ensure the success of your mainframe SOA initiatives, it's important to be
able to support both bottom-up and contract-first design approaches. With the
former, businesses may see an opportunity to jumpstart the SOA, quickly
packaging bite-sized chunks of mainframe code as Web Services, and pushing
them out to the rest of the organization to do with them what they will. But
experience shows that the contract-first approach - basically, Web Service
design informed by business processes - is a "best practice" that will yield
optimal results.
The Myth and Pitfalls of "Instant SOA" Let's look at the difference between
the two methodologies. With the bottom-up tactic, generally adopted for
"instant SOA," the mainframe developer wraps pieces of mainframe
functionality as ... (more)
As Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives attain critical mass in
the enterprise, there's more and more interest in boosting business results
and competitiveness (not to mention leveraging significant long-term
investments) by incorporating mainframe assets into the SOA. However, if this
attention is myopically focused on data and functionality, companies may be
overlooking the ... (more)