Todd Biske: Outside the Box

InfoWorld published a collection of end-user stories on SOA this week, and the discussion on Leapfrog Enterprises caught my attention. In the article, Galen Gruman states that:

Leapfrog had many of the same goals that typify a typical SOA initiative: greater reuse of code, faster development time, and easier integration. But the company did not want to approach SOA as simply a changing of the guard for development tools and integration platforms. Instead it wanted to free its developers from conforming to a platform’s idea of best practices so they could focus on the applications’ functionality and use a wide range of development technologies as best for each job.

[Eugene] Ciurana [director of systems infrastructure for Leapfrog] did not want to force developers to all use the same transport. “The transport doesn’t matter,” he says. He chose to use the open source Mule ESB as a messaging backbone, relying on it to deal with transport interfaces. That way, “developers could focus as little as possible on the implementation of services,” he explains. Instead, their focus is on the functionality they are trying to achieve. The result is that developers tend to use HTTP as their transport mechanism, but some use REST (Representational State Transfer) and SOAP — “whatever works best or they’re most comfortable in.”

This caught my attention because it appears to be contrary to what I’ve seen at other organizations. Typically, the organization wants to constrain the platform to ease the integration problem and get away from the notion of “any-to-any” integration hubs. This may just be my misinterpretation, but it does raise an interesting question. How many constraints should be put in place? Interestingly, I’ve yet to run into an organization that has had to drive adoption of XML-based integration via enterprise architecture. The developers have slowly migrated away from whatever distributed object technology they were using and toward XML. The bigger challenge has been whether or not the XML contained the right information for broad consumption, not on whether or not XML was used. That being said, many EA teams are focused on the latter constraint (when to use XML or not). Knowing that there’s only so much that can be governed, what are the critical factors that EA teams should be making sure we get right as compared to the broad spectrum of things that we could be governing? Is it worth the pain to create policies regarding SOAP/HTTP versus XML/HTTP? The approach draws parallels to the big government/small government discussions that go on between the Democrats and the Republicans. The right answer is very dependent on the culture within IT, as I’ve stated often in this blog. Personally, I’m not a big fan of the integrate any-to-any approach. That being said, I also recognize that not everything is going to adhere to the constraints. I think it’s important to differentiate between your connectivity (mediation) infrastructure and your service enablement activities. Connectivity is about connecting two parties that adhere to the constraints for communication that have been adopted by the organization. Unless there’s only one way to communicate, there will be a need for mediation, for example, HTTP to JMS bridging. It’s important that the set of technologies be small, however. Service enablement is about taking something that doesn’t adhere to the standards and exposing it in a way that it does. We should strive to reduce the amount of service enablement over time, but the need for connectivity and mediation will always be there.