Jeff Schneider writes about the evolution of SOA initiatives.
Recently Nick Malik has called upon the SOA community to stand up against JaBoWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services) as the cornerstone of an Enterprise SOA effort. Jeff does not agree, he has "determined that JBoWs is the natural first step that an organization takes on the path to service orientation".
Along the path to service orientation Jeff adds some other stepping stones: JBoGS (Just a Bunch of Governed Services) and PoPS (Patches of Planned Services). JBoGS extend JaBoWS with governance concepts, which add principles, discovery, policies and management to the set of web services within an enterprise:
JBoGs is the natural extension of JBoWS. Services continue to be funded in a project (and often silo manner) but are designed, built and operated according to modern governance concepts. With JBoGS, a company will most likely have some type of registry / repository solution, lifecycle governance and runtime management infrastructure and practices in place.
The next evolutionary step is to abandon the concept of application silos and start to establish a service landscape. Jeff speaks of "Patches of Planned Services", which introduce "the 'planning' view of SOA typically thought of as a top-down approach". "Patches" hint at the fact that planning starts at the domain level, gradually expanding service orientation to other domains of the enterprise "one area at a time".
Jeff summarizes the evolution as follows:
Most companies want to get their 'wild services' governed before they move to more ambitious goals. 2008 appears to be the start of the PoPS era. Companies that have matured their JBoGS are now looking for SOA to support business critical processes like order-to-cash [...] This is the driving force for creating planned communities of services which are typically aligned to business processes.
Finally Jeff predicts that PoPS are not the end of the line. The "future remains cloudy", though.