Implementing SOA Interoperability

How do you achieve the "connected systems" ideology that facilitates intelligent, stand-alone systems communicating with each other using a universal language? Is it practical to assume that one technology will dominate the market? Would that technology promote its proprietary standard as the default communication model? This is highly unlikely and defeats the core of SOA principals. Therefore, how will services on heterogeneous platforms communicate with each other? What interoperability options are available to an enterprise? How will WCF communicate with these non-Microsoft SOA offerings?

The objective of this chapter is to educate you about non-Microsoft SOA offerings and illustrate how they achieve interoperability between each other. We'll focus primarily on what products are available and where they stand in comparison to implementing solid interoperable stacks. We will not be able to dive into deep technical issues with each alternative SOA implementation. This chapter will merely introduce non-Microsoft offerings to increase your awareness. We will also discuss some practical issues regarding the interoperability of binary data, existing and emerging standards, and other competing technologies.

We'll conclude the chapter by discussing some of the key standards in the WS-* specifications that provide a solid enterprise-ready stack. These standards provide the foundation for rationalization in an enterprise of why WS-* and SOA are so critical for the future of integrated architectures. These standards will assist solution architects in identifying the critical success factors needed for investing in these technologies. We will specifically address Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) and WS-ReliableMessaging, as well as their vendor implementations. We will initiate the discussion by discussing the interoperability options available in Java.