Eighty-five paths to SOA success

Prentice Hall just announced the release of Thomas Erl's latest work, SOA Design Patterns, the industry's first-ever catalog of design patterns for SOA and Service Orientation. Adoption of these proven patterns should help in addressing the quality and capabilities of SOA efforts.

I had the pleasure of participating in the formal launch of the book at the SOA Symposium in October with Thomas, and am in the process of conducting a series of podcasts interviewing Thomas and co-authors including Clemens Utschig, Mark Little, Thomas Rischbeck. and Herbjörn Wilhelmsen. (The first introductory podcasts with Thomas Erl are posted.)

The 85 patterns identified in the book include Canonical Schema Bus, Composition Design Patterns, Enterprise Service Bus, Inventory Design Patterns, Policy Enforcement,  Reliable Messaging, Service Design Patterns, Service Grid, Three-Layer Inventory, and Transformation.

Thomas and his colleagues have been working on identifying and sculpting SOA patterns since 2004. If we're going to do SOA, we need to do it right, and borrow heavily from best practices identified and laid out by industry practitioners. The ability to develop services that can seamlessly integrate with each other will save a lot of resources and time. In addition, following design patterns help alleviate pressure to align services with business processes.

The patterns currently published were also well vetted and tested as part of a multi-year community participation and review process. There are also a number of candidate patterns working their way through the review process, including REST-related patterns. Members of the SOA and patterns communities are welcome to contribute, review, and use the content on this site and can submit their own candidate patterns.