Tools ease apps integration

Emerging service-orientated architecture technologies may make it easier to integrate old applications with new ones

As vendors offer new technologies including tools for utility computing, autonomic computing, grid architectures and web services, a single generic name is emerging to cover them all - service-oriented architecture (SOA). The common theme of the SOA technologies is that they should make it easier to integrate old applications with new ones.

Microsoft seems to recognise the importance of SOA, and has recently responded by announcing details of Indigo, a service-oriented architecture based on new development and deployment tools that will be included in the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn and due in 2006. However, Microsoft will have stiff competition from the many firms already providing such tools.

SOA implementations will require new applications to integrate legacy systems with modern web services. Tools such as the Object Management Group's (OMG's) Model Driven Architecture (MDA) suite will become increasingly popular because they support end-to-end applications development.

This is certainly the view of Teresa Jones of analyst company the Butler Group, and author of a recent report entitled Application Development Strategies. Jones noted that there are many tools to increase programmer productivity, but most of them are lacking in one key area.

"[These tools] do not provide an end-to-end development environment, and this is now a more important issue than programmer productivity," said Jones.

Jones also argued that development environments must do more to model business requirements and to support the design and development, testing, deployment, and management aspects. "The enterprise environment is changing, and applications have to change too," she said.

Jones added that the current modelling systems often have shortcomings. MDA promises improvements because it uses the OMG's Universal Modeling Language (UML). UML models are used to generate software source code, so changes to the model are automatically reflected in the code. "This makes it easier to develop and improve the functionality of an application, because the modelling process is something the business users can understand and directly contribute to," Jones said. "It makes later updates much faster and more reliable, and brings greater discipline to the development process."

This view is supported by Edwin Schumacher of Compuware. His firm's OptimalJ product is one of three MDA-compliant tools identified in the Butler Group report as top performers in this field. The other two are IBM's Application Development Solution and Interactive Objects' ArcStyler 4.0.

Explaining the advantages of MDA and these kinds of tools, Schumacher said, "If you look at the current development process there are a lot of people involved. There are business users, model designers, the IT department and so on. Often each step is done by a different team with manual translation steps, so translation errors become inevitable. MDA automates these processes and provides automatic transformation between the steps."