The full blog post can be found here:http://www.skywayperspectives.org/blog/?p=688

Skyway is interrested in getting feedback from the industry and community. From our experiences, the industrialization of enterprise software and the use of Software Generation technologies enables a pragmatic approach to other industry trends like Agile methodologies and Service Oriented Architectures.

Here is an excerpt from the posting:

“I thought it might be worth while to start to document Skyway’s point of view regarding enterprise software generation, and the things that we think are important in this space. Our goal is to promote an active conversation and to solicit feedback of all sorts to ensure that we are working to address those areas that the industry feels are most important to the adoption of generative techniques and ultimately the simplification of delivering enterprise software.

Our Top 10 Guiding Principles for Software Generation

1. Offer Incremental and Additive Approaches – Developers should be able to realize the benefits of software generation on their own terms using as much or as little of a generation system as they wish
2. Extensibility is Key – The generation system must be extendible, configurable, and customizable at every level
3. Exploit Every Asset – The possible sources of inputs to the generation should be as diverse as possible and be expandable by developers”

While SOA is middleware-driven, investment heavy and typically involves integrating several back-end systems, WOA is about being light-weight and originating standards-based services internally and externally that can be immediately consumed. WOA is not really an architecture but a style of integrating several applications, using mashups and open APIs, REST and RIA clients from a variety of sources.

REST is a popular, powerful and simple method of leveraging HTTP as a Web service. Information is represented in the form of resources on the network and is accessed and manipulated via a specified protocol. It will make sure that enterprises fall back on simpler and more straightforward methods that simply work.

WOA is a promising bet for enterprises. It is about building new applications of code, not components, with the interactions all loosely coupled from start to finish. It’s about integration and leveraging existing assets and providing better control and access to enterprise application-specific data immediately, not after an internal SOA infrastructure is in place. Enterprises have started adopting WOA and in a variety of ways: these services can come together as portals, standalone Web apps, SaaS, or RIA front ends to support extended enterprise processes.

Having said all this, WOA is not the solution to every problem. There are some higher end applications where only SOA stacks can come to the rescue. However, it surely is a robust, scalable and reliable technology to build open and powerful web services.

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With SOA, we have defined certain web-based interfaces which are specific to an existing system or module. It also has rendered it reusable too. Now, PaaS promises to extend these functionalities to the next level, wherein the whole platform would become accessible through a web browser. This means that enterprises now have to just develop and deploy their applications through a browser without shelling out any extra revenue on infrastructures.

It is agreed that PaaS readily helps create and deploy applications. However, the question here is, “Why should Enterprises adopt PaaS?” as they already have tools and technologies to meet the same goal. It certainly has some clear cut advantages such as no infrastructural costs, instant IDE, instant deployment, to name a few. They just have to choose the right platform depending on their needs and resources and subsequently, can shift their focus onto creating innovative applications, rather than the complex IT infrastructures. This would also mean the removal of critical barrier to entry for smaller ISVs.

The time has come when anyone with an internet connection can build various applications and deploy them across the globe. PaaS is here to stay, but it should be ensured that they are kept open so that the developers and designers do not get alienated from the mainstream.

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While SOA has been a technology architecture that has been around for a while, not many people have been successful using it as it is not very well implemented and requires proper governance mechanisms. SOA is based on the philosophy of building systems based on the interaction of loosely coupled, coarse-grained autonomous software units called Services. A service can be understood as the realization of self-contained business functionality in the form of software.

When organizations decouple their services from the silos that an application focus has placed them in, they realize the intrinsic value of the service and its relationship to their business processes. The value of an application does not become less, but the nature of an application changes to one where services form the core of the undertaking.

With that in mind, it becomes easier for Software as a Service (SaaS) to become a reality. An organization already making use of services finds it simple enough to integrate an external service. The reverse is also true. An organization using services finds it easier to expose its own services to external customers – in essence to take its services to market by providing Software as a Service.

Thus, the key principles of SOA, such as alignment between business and technology, loose coupling, composition, increased interoperability and federation make it an ideal foundation for a SaaS product.

Now, two key reasons why SaaS providers have always targeted small and medium enterprises was the inability of SaaS applications to integrate with existing IT assets of larger enterprises and the lack of customization of SaaS products.

However, by implementing SOA, this can be changed as it can allow you to accomplish the following:
• Your SaaS application can integrate well with existing IT assets of your end-user
• Mashups will become a possibility between business processes or services that can be a combination of on-demand and on-premise services
• SOA enabled SaaS will allow you to scale and flexibly version your software efficiently.

For it to act as a strong foundation for building SaaS products however, SOA must be implemented in a disciplined manner with excellent governance. This can lead to truly successful SaaS products.

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