Components

Combining Enterprise Web 2.0's (EW2.0) ability to deliver business-critical applications over the Web and Service Oriented Architecture's (SOA) capability to deliver services provides a solution that offers the ubiquitous consumption of service for anyone anywhere in any environment.

What to do with this ability will be the next challenge for IT and end users. IT will look for ways to create service-based components that can be reused across the enterprise. End users will look to be able to create their own "mash-ups" service components that will best suit their needs. Enterprises will continue looking for the return on their investment in their SOAs.

The key to meeting everyone's needs is a solution that lets organizations leverage legacy, Web Services, and SOA-oriented data sources to build enterprise-class "mash-up" or composite applications that extend beyond the data located behind firewalls or provided through a service vendor to include publicly available data from the Web. This means IT managers can quickly and easily add Web-based data, in turn giving users more data to work with, helping them do their jobs better and faster, and ultimately supporting businesses be more profitable and successful.

SOA
Companies today recognize the need to align IT assets quickly to meet changing needs. To stay competitive, organizations have to be agile; the data and the applications that support businesses must have the flexibility to change on-demand. Application administrators or end users must be able to customize the application or create a composite application to support specific situations.

SOA is a design and business strategy that facilitates this change by providing a highly adaptive software system that supports new applications that are loosely coupled, flexible, and highly agile. Using SOA, IT organizations can create applications and access information using standards-based, reusable business services that can be directly mapped to business functions. Once an enterprise has exposed its services, it may then design new composite services or business applications and processes to align further with the organization's mission.

Fundamental concepts of SOA include:

• Everything is considered a service: business service (e.g., CRM, order processing), infrastructure service (e.g., security, transaction management), and UI service (e.g., mash-ups, widgets).
• All services are directly addressable by applications or other services.
• Services are interoperable using standards-based loose coupling.
• Applications that consume services are insulated from changes in other applications.

The successful implementation of SOA will increase an organization's responsiveness to changing market demands. It mitigates the risks associated with vendor lock-in and reduces development costs by leveraging legacy assets and reusing existing services. It helps drive new revenue and increases market share as well as time-to-market.

For many companies, their SOA initiatives have reached an inflection point. Most best-in-class companies have found the SOA infrastructures in place have successfully unlocked valuable business information from disparate back-ends.

The challenge that remains is to deliver these business services to the end user. This "last mile" of SOA needs to be delivered for the IT department to fully reap the benefits of its efforts. Enterprise mash-up applications are emerging as the preferred solution to empower the end user with SOA-enabled applications. In this model, organizations focus on the consumption layer of SOA and its extension into the client tier.

This could also mean that the UI widgets themselves are services. These pre-built widgets will already be connected to data and services; and they will be ready for consumption.

Enterprise Web 2.0
Web 2.0 promises to turn the Internet into a true operating platform - featuring robust client-side logic and rich interfaces that mimic the performance and security of fat client applications. For enterprise IT teams, achieving the aims of Web 2.0 requires more than adopting popular Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) development languages like AJAX, Flash, Java, and .NET.

Enterprises require:

• A framework that provides standardization and simplification across different business applications and development technologies while ensuring the flexibility required for innovation within business units. It must also support SOA initiatives by enabling the consumption of loosely coupled services that provide access to business functionality and data in real-time
• Applications with reliable and secure communications between client and server operating across any network, browser, and operating system and must include a distributed model-view-controller that reduces server calls and performs consistently whether online, offline, or mobile.
• A development environment that leverages existing code, development standards, tools, skills, and infrastructure.

EW2.0 requires an architecture that integrates both an Enterprise Services Layer and a Services Consumption Layer.

SOA and Enterprise Web 2.0
Many characteristics of the Enterprise Service Layer also apply to the consumption layer. UI services and widgets are pre-built and highly reusable, similar to back-end application services exposed as business services. Preferably, they are bundled together to form a composite application where the widgets are already connected to the back-end business services. These "service widgets" form the ideal components to create mash-up applications.

These widgets are governed like business services in an SOA. Providing the visibility, lifecycle and change management of these widgets is important to ensure quality, predictability, and transparency.

Existing SOA governance platforms (SOA Registry and/or Repository) focus on these key areas as they relate to server-side business services. The best platforms open the dialog with different SOA vendors to achieve interoperability.

To achieve the benefits of an SOA-enabled EW 2.0 application, the services should be governed and easily discoverable for architects, business analysts, developers, and users. By doing so, development of applications will be more consistent across the enterprise. Developers will be able to browse through the list of services from their integrated development environment (IDE) and consume both business services and UI services.

This governance will also allow service providers to perform impact analysis. By analyzing the relationships between the consumer and the provider of services, the services can be continuously improved. Examples of such relationships include service widgets consuming business services, "mash-ups" consuming service widgets or mash-ups, and composite services consuming business services. Conditions such as security compliance policies, standards, and service level agreements (SLAs) must be defined for each relationship. The quality and performance of the Web application depends on the quality and performance of the underlying services.

SOA governance platforms will manage the relationships and the associated policies and service levels. As a result, impact, lifecycle, change, quality, and performance management processes will apply to both the UI and business services.