Ashish Banerjee
Chief Software Technologist, Sun Microsystems India

We've come reasonably far with SOA creating requisite awareness and mind share. However our current approach to SOA needs to be more mature in various terms. For example, we need to improve the clarity and completeness of the various Web services standards and, when they become available, we have to ensure that this more complete, mature, coherent set of standards is broadly adopted.

We also need to be constantly aware of the need to standardize the format and semantics of the data that we send and receive over SOA. We need to be just as clear as to the process semantics that surround and govern each of the exchanges as we are of those that make up SOA-based composite applications.

Finally, we should not overlook the challenge of connecting composite applications with all of the small and very small enterprises that don't have the technical capability to implement Web services stacks, data transformation programs, orchestration solutions, and all of the other technologies that generally go into building an enterprise-class SOA infrastructure.

How do we address issues like this? While there are approaches that are entirely valid for fixing each of these problems individually, we need a Web services intermediary of some kind to fix all four... (More)