Cheap Alternatives to SOA Part 1

Post date: Mar 16, 2014 10:08:39 AM

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are commonly based on expensive platforms such as Process Servers and Enterprise Service Buses (ESB) which are proprietary and use closed formats for specific constructs.

I would like to explore in a series of articles some cheap alternatives to it which are based on open standards and libraries, more specifically REST Principles and JAX-RS.

The motivation behind acquiring these proprietary tools and platforms in a SOA world is triggered most of the time by the need of connecting disparate systems with different maintenance windows running on different platforms and obeying to different Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

More importantly long running processes that last for months and even years are the means of orchestrating the interactions between these systems and this, together with asynchronous interactions are the building blocks that are offered out of the box by these complex proprietary frameworks under the IBM Websphere Process Server and Oracle SOA umbrellas.

Are there any open source cheap alternatives? More specifically resource oriented? My opinion is that there are such alternatives and they are usually hidden under JAX-RS implementations and more importantly under a collection of design patterns and principles coming from the integration arena.

About these and more in the entries to come...