The purpose of the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) project group is to develop a best practices guide for the adoption of SOA in education. To this end, the best practices will cover the following aspects:

• The education specific standards to be adopted when creating an SOA -based solution;
• Common service components that can be adopted from other market sectors;
• The underlying technology required to implement an SOA-based design;
• The migration issues to be addressed when adopting an SOA-based solution;
• The business process issues that need to be considered in the context for realization through a set of services;
• Determining the return on investment for SOA-based solutions in education.

Participants
    
The IMS Technical Advisory Board approved the SOA Charter in January 2008. IMS GLC Public Community participants may download a copy of the IMS SOA Charter.

The Final SOA Whitepaper is available for download.

The Current Challenge
SOA is one of the architectural frameworks (a collection of guiding design principles, a vocabulary of types of components and assembly rules) used to define and build Information & Communication Technology (ICT) systems. As the name implies, SOA is based on building systems that are composed or built from services. SOA is one of the many frameworks used to define a distributed computing system: a system built (composed) from discrete components (decomposition guided by a separation of concerns) that are distributed across a network, and that interact by exchanging message requests between the components. Where there is a range of possible values for a characteristic (e.g., state, coupling), SOA defines specific measures of the characteristics (design principles). While these are the preferred values for these characteristics, there are no hard and fast rules to say that an approach that violates one of the characteristics or principles does not correspond to SOA.

The Proposed Solution
There are many differing and confusing claims made for SOA. SOA suffers from the classical ‘hype’ common for total-solution architectures. SOA itself is an industry neutral concept, and many of the basic elements of SOA have been addressed in multiple places. The objective of this project is to create adoption practices to highlight:

• Entry point into the solution
• Applicable business/SOA pattern
• Possible architectural layout
• Show how the solution improves SOA maturity
• Governance decisions
• Applicable standards

 

Further Information
For information on the SOA project, please contact us.