SO-UH... IT SOA Part 4. No, really separation of concerns.

From the previous blog site, I've had 3 entries on exploring why the SOA vision isn't really hard -- not to be confused with the reality in the industry -- which is nonetheless quite difficult to sort through. At any rate, so far I've stated that Service Orientation is important because it gives the industry a common approach to develop, design and speak of distributed applications; that in order to be successful, SOA principles must at its heart embrace our existing technology; and that finally, a greater level of flexibility can be achieved by ensuring that our service consumers and our service providers have a level of independence -- an appropriate level of separation of concerns, such that provider implementations can be changed with independence from and of the consumers.

To really achieve a separation of concerns between the service consumer and service provider, it is often beneficial to introduce the concept of service virtualization. Service virtualization is the concept that we don't actually publish the concrete service provider to consumers, we publish an intermediary which exposes the formal service interface and business contract. In its simplest form, the intermediary is really just a pass-thru which merely passes parameters and context to the real, concrete service provider implementation. In more complicated forms, dynamic decisions can be added to the intermediary to choose the most appropriate service provider implementation. A very simple business example is the famous "getStockQuote" service. Some stock quotes are delayed 20 minutes but are free to obtain; whereas real time quotes usually cost the consumer a small fee to obtain. Both provide the same service, one has a greater expense to the business, but better quality of service. This intermediary is sometimes called a mediation.

Service virtualization is one of several beneficial aspects of Enterprise Service Bus patterns.

Bottomline: Separation of concerns is a good thing to build flexible, agile applications. Best practices and newer programming constructs can achieve a good deal of separation of concerns. Service virtualization complements these concepts, and extends separation of concerns to older programming styles, patterns, languages. Service virtualization facilitates us embracing legacy applications, utilizing them where they are hosted.

Steve Kinder