Happy To Be Of Service
The current IT and software development world is very much concerned with services, and service oriented architecture. This is a world well suited for Dovetail Software, we were service oriented from the beginning.
We started life exposing Clarify processes in APIs, and these have evolved today into Web services as well. Our purpose was always to provide extensibility to the Clarify install. It was a more elaborate procedure in earlier years.
“SEC.NET also supports “API invoke mode”, which allows any of the hundreds of available high level APIs from the Dovetail SDK to be invoked. This was originally written to allow systems to send email for integration purposes […] This capability was built years ago, before the prevalence of SOA architectures. Modern systems will typically just call anAPI directly, or even make a WebService call, as opposed to invoking an API over email (basically, RPC over email).” – Email Integration with Clarify
Services are appealing to all levels of the enterprise because the architecture makes sound development and integration sense to IT, and at the desktop the increase in data reach and customization of view delivers unprecedented power to the users. But there can be innumerable headaches for the enterprise in evolving to SOA – by no means all technical – one of the greatest being the need to place governance on services.
Godfather of Web Services and SOA Rajiv Gupta describes SOA this way:
“As the name suggests, a Service Oriented Architecture is one where application functionality is packaged as autonomous services that adhere to industry standard interfaces (WSDL, SOAP), and the services are then deployed in an IT architecture that makes for their most effective use.” – Security in a SOA
Enterprise network users experience a large and rapidly growing variety of services on the Web for easy consumption, and bring their new appetite for custom data views back to their desk, and Enterprise 2.0 is an unstoppable next development for this very reason. How to manage its advent is the current challenge for the leadership suite, which hopefully includes IT.
“SOA and E2.0 have a very common goal, in that the purpose of both is to detach applications from underlying technology, whether it’s on the back-end system or the front-end interface. In this instance, desktops are an enterprise’s biggest expense and biggest management headache. By moving services out to the cloud, E2.0 promises to liberate companies and end-users from the constant and expensive upgrade cycle for both hardware and software.” – AJAX and Enterprise 2.0 for that ‘last mile’ of SOA
Dovetail Software has always seen the added value that comes to a system by using open standards, broadly useful development platforms, and widely available delivery infrastructures. With the convergence of on-demand technologies and on-premise governance, the separation of business rules from application logic, and the liberation of processes into composable services, we find ourselves, as software developers, very much at home in this world.
