Several years ago a few smart people (yes, Bill and myself included) developed a contrived SOA reference implementation as part of our roles as Enterprise Architects in a group charged with Strategy, Architecture and Innovation within the Information Technology Group. We needed something more flexible (and entertaining) than the traditional stock trader or banking scenario, so Baloney on Barter (BOB) was born. Though BOB is several years old (ancient in technology terms), we continue to use many of the concepts and lessons learned today in our consulting roles not from a technology perspective rather as an approach to establishing an architecture goal, executing the forward engineering to prove the concept and supporting the concepts with a complete set of artifacts for all levels of staff. In other words, the process of Enterprise Architecture with focus on applications and technology.
In future posts we will get into the architecture, use cases, and additional details, but as an intro it will be beneficial for you to understand what we were charged with accomplishing. BOB needed to fulfill the following needs:
- A technology demonstrator
- A reference implementation for a Service Infrastructure Reference Architecture; the engineers view
- A reference implementation for a Service Reference Architecture; the developers view
- A reference implementation for training purposes for both engineers and developers
- A set of use cases for vendor evaluations
- An easy way to flush out opinions and ideas
As one might expect, when a group of smart people get together, ideas and opinions are plenty. It was this simple fact that led us down the path of a contrived sample, rather than to leverage an existing project or use a traditional scenario. If we used an existing project then there would be a very finite set of use cases with little room to explore, not to mention set time-lines and politics.
Next up in this series we will go over our set of guiding principles that we identified.
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Tags: Reference Implementation, Service Oriented Architecture