SOA?

[The title is meant to be read like Nithin's phlegmatic "so?". This is a brief description of the technology that I work on.]

Once upon a time, there was a company called ABIC - Akhila Bharatha Insurance Company. When they started off, say 900 years ago, there was no IT, no management, no.. (Throws a BufferOverflowException). Everything was done on paper and mind you, we aren't even talking about recycled paper here.

800 years into the business, many big changes started to happen. For one thing, there were computers, using which the work could be done a lot faster and most of the staff could now be laid off. People had to start inventing words like "downsizing" and "rightsizing" to make the laid off employees feel better. But bad news, there were also a lot of competitors who threatened to steal away their business if they didn't adapt.

So, Akhila Bharatha started to buy lots of new software so they could now keep up with the rapidly changing, competitive market. ABIC also started to acquire smaller companies with complementary products and services, and kept growing their business. All this rapid change created new problems for the IT department.

"It isn't enough to just buy the new technology, it must also work in concert with what we already have in place," complained the IT department.

Management replied: "That's cool. Why don't we just integrate the old stuff with the new stuff, and we'll all live happily ever after?"

"Integration will take 18 months, and that's assuming that our programmers never go to the bathroom and that no new technologies emerge by then. WE want a system that's built with change in mind."

So the management and IT together looked for a solution and came across this concept called SOA: service oriented architecture. Which suggests, simply, "Let's turn all of our existing software assets and turn them into 'services'. Each service does one thing and one thing only, and becomes a black box to the business process and to other services. We couple all of these together 'loosely' - a concept that was in some 7th sem textbook that we're all supposed to know. That way, the management and business people can 'black box' the whole of IT. Hmm. "

SOA is the logical next step (after OOP) in computer technology, given that we studied object oriented programming till 8th sem and now we're reading about SOA.

ABIC was very happy with the idea of SOA, but soon the question came up: "How exactly do we turn our software into these services". To which the answer was: "Sorry, I've only read the SOA book till Chapter 5."

The folks at ABIC will (perhaps) read the remaining chapters and implement SOA. And live happily ever after.

I like happy endings.