David Linthicum on OSOA
David Linthicum seems to have just realized the significance of Service Component Architecture and Service Data Objects and the OSOA.
David Linthincum does a good job of describing Service Data Objects and also recognizes that using databases in SOA will be one of the most significant use cases:
SDO is looking to provide a consistent way of handling data in applications, whatever its source or format may be. Okay, that would be data abstraction. Moreover, SDO provides a way to unify data handling for databases and services.
It's clear that SDO is designed to unify the way in which SOA applications handle data. Using SDO, application programmers can uniformly access and manipulate data from heterogeneous data sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web Services, and enterprise information systems.
SDO is based on the concept of disconnected data graphs or a collection of tree-structured or graph-structured data objects. Under a disconnected data graphs architecture, a client retrieves a data graph from a data source, mutates the data graph, and then applies the data graph changes back to the data source.
Databases are connected to the applications by data mediator services. Client applications query a data mediator service and get a data graph in response. Client applications send an updated data graph to a data mediator service to have the updates applied to the original data source, and this architecture allows applications to deal principally with data graphs and data objects.
'Data mediator services' are now called Data Access Services, but otherwise David Linthincum provides a great overview.
The one thing he does not point out - the SDO API is the only industry standard for data access in SOA.
PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software