I am just coming back for Toronto where I have been presenting Oracle Developer Day: SOA for J2EE Developers. As part of this exercise I have introduced Web Services and related technologies/standards.
A person in the audience asked me:
But can I do SOA Today? Are Web Services are mature enough?
I think that is a very interesting and valid question. The answer is certainly:
- Yes you can, and I would add, yes you should!!
Web Services are definitively big actors in Service Oriented Architecture since by definition they are loosely coupled, implementation agnostic and facilitate reusability. In the same time the concern of this person are justified since some important pieces of infrastructure are yet available in vendors solutions. Or if they exist they are proprietary and won't allow interoperability of the service with other stack... Losing interoperability is a big deal when you talk about Web Services since most of the time, if the designers want to use Web Services it is to be able to reuse it in various applications, independently of the platform where this application is running.