Mike Smith, iSeries Chief Architect, Speaks Out on SOA

by Mary Lou Roberts

Three weeks ago, The Four Hundred took a look at Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the application development methodology that makes use of reusable components that contain application logic to perform a single business function. We talked with a variety of iSeries software developers that are employing SOA in their applications. They all touted the benefits--flexibility, agility, decreased cost, and platform independence--of SOA and some predicted that SOA will give new life to those aging iSeries boxes and increase the odds that new i5s will find their way into the enterprise.

What's IBM's position for the iSeries in the world of SOA? To answer that question, Mary Lou Roberts interviewed Mike Smith, IBM's development distinguished engineer and iSeries chief architect. Here's what he had to say.

Mary Lou Roberts: Is SOA just another buzzword, or does it represent the way in which developers are going to be developing and maintaining systems in the future?

Mike Smith: That's a great question. It's actually something of both. People are enamored with the buzzword right now, but as you start to understand what the SOA architecture means underneath in terms of the method of putting applications together and the benefits of putting those applications together, it does become a compelling framework to develop applications. People don't understand it well enough yet to get beyond the buzzwords, but once they look at what the benefits are, I think they'll get there.

MLR: What are the primary benefits of SOA?

MS: The benefits come primarily in the areas of productivity and flexibility. You get more productivity because you can take components of your applications and recombine them in new ways, so when you get a new business requirement, you can take the services that you have already made available and assemble them to meet that new business requirement. The flexibility you get is because a service-oriented architecture is server-agnostic and language-agnostic. In fact, it's agnostic toward anything. Application services can be componentized and replaced on an ongoing basis, so I can do independent upgrades, I can do independent replacements, I can do independent failovers from a business resilience point of view--all without impacting the application. That's built into the architecture.

MLR: When people talk about SOA they usually talk about it in the same breath with web services. Can you clarify the difference between the terms "SOA" and "Web services?" Are they the same thing?

MS: Web services are an enabling mechanism for services-oriented architectures. But I can certainly have Web services without realizing all of the benefits of a services-oriented architecture. For example, I could use Web services just as a transport-independent call mechanism. But SOA means quite a bit more than that when we look at the getting the location independence, the failover capabilities, the quality of service capabilities that can be plugged into an SOA. That's not just a flat-out call interface which is what a base web service is. You can look at the entire family of Web services architectures and then you can start to see where SOA is built on top of the base Web service.

MLR: Can you have SOA without Web services?

MS: I suppose technically you could. You could follow the principles of an SOA architecture but not have your underlying transport mechanism be a Web service. But I think it would be pretty unnatural, though. SOA built on top of a Web service is a natural progression. It would be technically possible, but it would be technically uninteresting.

MLR: Another term that's used a lot in discussing SOA is "componentization." Would you define what you mean by componentization as distinct from SOA and Web services?

MS: As you know, the style of computer programming on the System/36 and System/38 was focused on large, monolithic code where the business logic, the presentation logic, the data access logic were all wound together. What I mean by componentization is taking that monolithic heritage application and breaking it into much smaller, consumable chunks and separating out the data access, the business access, and the presentation access so that I can put those on different tiers if I need to. For example, the business logic tier may be distributed across many servers just pointing to a single database server, and the presentation layer may be out on a Web browser or a Windows client, for example. Componentization is breaking monolithic code into smaller, consumable chunks. That's where you will get the intellectual control, because the complexity will be reduced by separating out the presentation, data, and business logic. It's a necessary step to get to a Web service, as well as being the most logical step to getting to SOA, although you wouldn't have to do either of those.

MLR: What's the relevance of SOA for iSeries shops?

MS: SOA is going to become very important for iSeries users because there is a lot of business logic and business data stored in iSeries servers, or, more specifically, in i5/OS. SOA is becoming an enabling mechanism for that legacy or heritage business data to be combined in new ways and become more responsive to new business requirements. Winding back to your earlier question about the benefits, SOA is the enabling mechanism that takes a lot of things that already exist and realizes those benefits. The relevance for the iSeries is that we have a lot of data that is already there and SOA becomes the easiest enabling mechanism to do that.

MLR: Is that true only in large shops that have heterogeneous environments, or is it true also for shops that are primarily iSeries shops. Do they have a reason to adopt SOA?

MS: It depends somewhat on the company. It's mostly relevant for companies that are really developing new code. SOA connectivity or compliance may be something that an end user puts onto his independent software vendor (ISV), no matter the size. This could be universally applicable to small, medium and large iSeries users and ISVs, depending on what their integration requirements are for pulling together various applications, or for collaboration requirements where they need to extend their logic or data outside their enterprise. For example, look at the UCCnet standards that are being dictated by Wal-Mart. If I'm a Wal-Mart supplier, I will comply with those kinds of standards, regardless of my size and regardless of the size of the ISV that provided my application, if I didn't build it myself.

MLR: Is there anything about the iSeries and OS/400 that makes it particularly suitable for SOA?

MS: We are doing work right in our base compilers and underlying object mechanism and service programs to expose existing logic directly through Web services, which is the enabling architecture for SOA, so these services fit very naturally into our compilers. That's interesting to iSeries people because they are compiling a lot of heritage code. The other thing that's interesting about the iSeries is that we have always been an integrated platform. We're doing the same thing with Web services, so Web services and SOA aren't going to be an add-on set of products and downloads that iSeries people need to do; it's buried right into our complier, Web application server, and Web server, so it's going to become a part of what the operating system does. That is already started.

MLR: Do you believe that SOA, if looked at and adopted by an end-user iSeries shop, would it help them to modernize their applications in such a way that they may decide not to move off the platform, since some of them are looking at doing that.

MS: Yes. If we look at the newest versions of the iSeries Developers Roadmap that are being rolled out right now, we show how the componentization and modernization of business logic and the corresponding user interface improvements are direct steps along the way to becoming SOA-compliant. We believe that this Developers Roadmap, starting with componentizing the RPG or heritage code--getting intellectual control of that code and then getting you back down the path to an SOA architecture--are completely complementary, even if you decide not to go all the way to SOA.

MLR: If I do not have Java skills internally, does that lock me out?

MS: No. In fact, look at the SkyWay announcement, which does support the iSeries. It's a codeless SOA environment that generates Java code, but you don't need to look at the Java code if you don't want to.

MLR: What tools and services does IBM offer, specifically, to help iSeries shops move to SOA?

MS: IBM just announced a new initiative that is helping customers become SOA aware and compliant. It's a jump-start package, so you can refer back to that announcement. You can't get any better than that with free access to experts within IBM.

MLR: The IBM SOA page talks about having 40,000 developers working on Web services applications and 35,000 consultants with Web services knowledge and experience. Are those resources all in Global Services?

MS: There is a lot of Web services-SOA experience outside of IGS as well as inside. One organization in particular which is not part of Global Services is the group that is working with iSeries Innovation that is energizing the top iSeries ISVs as it's developing the roadmap that tells you how to get to from modernization intellectual control to services-oriented architecture. There are a lot of SOA skills in there. The Initiative for Innovation [http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/innovation/] is where we are relaunching the Developers Roadmap. We're touching the top few thousand ISVs and teaching them how to modernize their applications including SOA compliance, application integration, business process modeling, and there are definitely SOA skills in solutions enablement to support that program.

MLR: Do you have any sense of how many of those top-tier ISVs for the iSeries are actively involved in implementing SOA?

MS: I would say from our initial six months that this program has been going, there's been quite a bit of interest in application modernization. If I had to guess on a percentage, I'd say probably a third of them, and a much higher percentage of them interested in the componentization and intellectual control. Those ISVs are on an SOA path without realizing it as they componentize their logic and get them set up for SOA. They know that they need to do something better with their applications and are taking steps on how to get to SOA.

MLR: What advice would you give someone just starting out on the SOA path?

MS: From an ISV perspective, the pitfalls are that you rush into an SOA architecture for the architecture's sake without spending enough time doing the modeling that tells you what you want your business objects to be, what you want your access methods to be, and so on. If you just take the individual, discrete components that you want without doing the overall modeling, you're probably going to end up with something that isn't optimal. You may end up with too many web services. Spending good time on the modeling up front as to what you want to be business objects and how you want the process flows to work is very important.

MLR: What type of person should be making that assessment? Is that a business person, or is it a programmer? Who is doing that job?

MS: This is one reason that I think the iSeries is very well suited to SOA, because we have business programmers--people who have the concepts of how computers and programs work with the savvy to know how businesses work as well. Typically this is done by a business modeler and turned over to a programmer to implement, but in an iSeries shop--and especially in the heritage applications--those are typically people with the same skill sets, so you can optimize it better on an iSeries than, perhaps, on any other platform.

MLR: I know you plan to speak on this topic at COMMON. What is the summary of the speech you are going to give?

MS: An SOA is going to allow you to become more productive and more flexible. It will give you productivity gains and you'll be able to respond to business needs faster. You will get business resilience and location independence so that you can better react to fluctuations in your demands. The other thing I will tell them is that IBM understands the importance of SOA, and we have a Roadmap that is going to take you along with us. You can see that in the Developers Roadmap, which we will be really hyping at COMMON as well. So I'll be talking about how componentization is a step toward web services, and how web services is a step, then, toward SOA to realize those benefits.

MLR: Is it likely that shops that buy into the SOA concept and move in that direction will say, "Wow, this lets me get more from my iSeries, so I'm going to keep it and possibly even begin new development on the iSeries?"

MS: We are already seeing that. As part of our Initiative for Innovation program, the ISVs see that they don't need to get rid of their heritage code. They can reuse it and leverage it without having to rewrite it. One of the compelling messages that have resonated is that we do know how to break that code apart and reassemble it to meet new business requirements.

MLR: What about situations where there is no heritage code, but people just love the platform. Will this help them to put in brand new applications on the iSeries? Will SOA have any impact on them deciding to use the iSeries for brand new application development?

MS: SOA, per se, will not have an influence. It will be the iSeries implementation of SOA that will make them look at the platform. So, as iSeries becomes compliant to an SOA architecture and supports an application running in an SOA architecture, we can do what we've always done in terms of simplification and integration and become an easier application to deploy SOA applications on that will be the reason that we will get new applications on the iSeries. The iSeries will be able to do it more simply and less costly.

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SOA: A Life-Line for the iSeries?

Mary Lou Roberts, a 35-year veteran of the information systems industry, is a new contributor to IT Jungle. In addition to her work as a reporter in the iSeries space, she has spent her career as a marketing and communications professional working exclusively with information technology publications and companies. She can be reached at WriterNewf@aol.com.