SOEA - Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture

As a previous employee at the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency working whit OIOXML I heard a lot of nagging about OIOXML being impossible to use in practice.

I am now on the “other side of the table” and assist customers in implementing OIOXML. So now I guess I should start nagging on my former colleagues… But NO. As I have always claimed: OIOXML is easy and fits perfectly with the ideas of SOA an EA (SOEA). Of course there are challenges, but it has newer been easy to develop enterprise-wide data definitions/models!

But if you don’t understand OIOXML NDR, SOA and EA (SOEA) it is understandable that it’s going to be extremely difficult to develop OIOXML schemas.

So, accusing OIOXML of being useless and impossible is not right. However I perfectly understand that people find it difficult to develop OIOXML as there is not a lot of material that puts OIOXML in perspective. Here are just a couple of suggestions on articles that I believe can help to create a better understanding of OIOXML:

• From Data modeling to message modeling
• OIOXML and SOA/EA (SOEA)
• Best practice on designing OIOXML
• When to use OIOXML, and when not to use OIOXML

Feel free to add further suggestions..

Just a little follow-up on the local a|EA Chapter in Denmark where I am now a member of the board, and looking at my follow board members I am sure that the Danish a|EA chapter is going to be a very interesting chapter – at least if you a EA-geak

For the people that know me there should be now doubt in their mind that I see ESB as a concept (an ESB) and not a product (the ESB). The reason I bring this up is that I have just read the article “Applying ESB” in the April edition of the CBDi Journal.

It is my conception that CBDi agrees with my view of an ESB, but I have a critique of their latest article where they start to try and specify what is, and what is not, a part of an ESB. In my world an ESB should be viewed as a paradigm which can be used in a SOA. How the ESB is to be perceived within the individual architectural context is part of making a successful SOEA.

The following table is just some of the aspects which should be considered when conceptualizing your ESB – what do you need, what is nice to have and what doesn’t matter?

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