Prague 360 - Google Maps Mashup

An excellent example of a Google Maps mashup is the AJAX driven Prague 360 site. Prague is a beautiful city and this site does an amazing job of showing the sites and giving the user a feel for the Prague experience. Prague 360 uses the Google Maps API and is AJAX in action. Enjoy Prague!

SOA Divorced From Web Services?

Many people use the terms SOA and Web Services interchangeably, but the two have different meanings. This article describes the differences between the two but stresses that they both have the same common goal – saving software development investment and effort by reusing software components.

The differences between Web Services and SOA include:

• Web Services reuse is implemented at runtime by dynamically discovering needed components to solve a problem. SOA reuse is focused on a software governance plan for an enterprise.
• SOA relies on software that can communicate on multiple protocols to existing services, while Web Services relies on discovering new services.
• SOA uses any message format and protocol where Web Services is focused on XML.

SOA Adoption Models

The success of SOA depends on how it is adopted by an organization. There are 3 basic SOA adoption models today: ad-hoc, organic, and strategic. Organizations that use the ad-hoc approach focus only on their current needs and miss out on the reuse benefits of SOA, resulting in increased complexity and further non-standardization. The organic approach requires a small initial investment and builds a foundation for other projects to follow. The focus is on developing standards, best practices, processes, and structure that can further evolve. The strategic aproach to SOA builds a roadmap for implementation for the entire organization. This approach demonstrates the recommended use of standards and best practices for the enterprise.

In order to be successful, organizations must implement either an organic or strategic strategy and focus on the following:
• Align SOA objectives with business drivers
• Identify SOA adopters
• Address organizational barriers to adoption
• Define and measure success