Many are looking for best practices in deploying a service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, first you need to know what you are up against. Some of the obstacles that architects face were described in a talk by Paul Lipton, senior architect for office of the CTO at IT management software provider CA Inc. Lipton posed more questions than answers in his presentation on "The New SOA Synergy: How Runtime Governance, Triage and Security Must Work Together," which he delivered this week at Enterprise Architect Summit 2007. First, however, Lipton described SOA as an approach that's here to stay.
"It's pretty clear now that we've bought into SOA. It's really good 1980s thinking. There's really nothing new under the sun here," Lipton said. He added that there's no vendor out there that hasn't embraced XML standards, and the extensibility aspect of XML has really opened things up.