SOA : Synchronous Operations Available?

Published 30 March 05 04:15 PM | despos

Like many of you I guess, I am agile and extreme and I didn't know. I also realized that the first distributed application that I designed back in 1994 was already SOA-oriented--for what I can say I know about SOA today.

Wherever I turn to read about SOA, I see that the adjective asynchronous is regularly associated with SOA descriptions. Sure, SOA and async operations seem to be a perfect duo. My 2-cent question is: what about inherently synchronous operations? I'm far from saying and even thinking that one should embrace a design technology altogether, so I can easily imagine portions of distributed apps based on pure SOA services and portions designed according to other design patterns.

I'm confused because I see lots of articles and papers around that emphasize the benefits of SOA. But these benefits seem to assume asynchronous operations. What about the remainder--read, synchronous operations? Or, more likely, what am I missing here?

Comments

# SBC said on March 30, 2005 03:21 PM:

I think you are 'agile & extreme' because you write a lot of books & articles.. :-)

I think the matter of SOA's sync vs. async is a superfluous argument because it depends upon the SOA application's requirements itself. I don't believe that async contributes additional benefits than sync or vice-versa.
The SOA application may demand sync operations capability (e.g., real-time financial transactions as in Stock quotes and purchases) or async operations (e.g., an order-form in an online store). Of course, in async cases, an acknowledgement can be given but not necessarily the entire transaction processed.

Then there are at least two mechanisms to distribute - unicast (point-to-point) and multicast (single point to multiple points). These too depend upon the nature of the application of the SOA. So, I don't believe that benefits of SOA are inherent upon sync or async but only how it is applied for the application.

SBC

# Ed Daniel said on April 6, 2005 11:10 AM:

Dino, have you checked out the discussions surrounding ESB (basically we've now got a name for what we've been up to for the last few years - Enterprise Service Bus architectures) - I can bet you did something like that already with MSMQ.

Anyhow take a good smattering of SOA and use ESB to make it work and all of a sudden life is so much easier.

The takeaway for me is this - when integrating a new application into the ecosystem you write one interface, not an interface for each part you need to integrate with in the ecosystem. That, for lazy chaps like me is what it's all about.

Hope you're well and do check out what we're up to over here:
http://events.rainbowportal.net

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