Danish version: http://qed.dk/jeppe-cramon/2014/02/01/soa-synkron-kommunikation-data-ejerskab-og-kobling/
I read the other day that the new system Proask for the National Board of Industrial Injuries in Denmark, was the first major project that would realize the Ministry of Employment strategic decision to use a Service Oriented Architecture ( SOA). For those who have not heard of Proask, it is yet another strongly delayed public project which, like most other public projects, are trying to solve a very big problem in a large chunk. A lot can be written about this approach, but in this blog post I will focus on here is their approach to SOA. A related article reports that the new Proask system is 5 times slower than their old system from 1991.
The Proask project was initiated in 2008. It made me think back on that other ( private) SOA prestige project from the same period, for which I was an architect for a subcontractor. The entire project was built around SOA with many subsystems that would deliver services. The entire architecture was built around an ESB that would act as facilitator in terms of mapping and coordination. All communication was done as synchronous WebService calls over HTTP(S). So classic SOA for the period 2003-201? (sadly synchronous calls are still the predominant integration form today). This SOA realization was also characterized by very poor performance, high latency and low stability.
But why ? The reason lies in the way they had chosen to split up the services and not least that they had chosen to communicate synchronously between the different services and made use of layered SOA approach.
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