In this second in a series of three articles on SOA, BEA offers a concrete plan along with tips and insights to help you build an effective SOA roadmap and ensure the success of your SOA initiative.

Any great journey starts with a goal or destination, and your organization's decision to implement SOA is no different. But like the pioneers who set off West in their covered wagons, you may be starting with only a vague idea of what awaits you, or how you might get to your destination. To be successful, you must assess your organization's strengths and weaknesses, establish clear direction, choose a route and then consistently reassess that route as you follow it. This article can help you understand the terrain and the challenges you might face, and helps you start the process of creating your own unique map for your journey.

Service component architecture (SCA) is a new technology specification from BEA, IBM, Interface21, IONA, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, and Sybase. SCA simplifies application development and implementation in an SOA, to help you create new IT assets and transform existing ones into reusable services that can be rapidly adapted to changing business requirements. SCA may greatly reduce the complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of the programming languages they were written in and the platforms they run on.

As a model for implementing IT services defined as business functions, SCA helps shield programmers from most of the complexity of traditional middleware programming. SCA also helps you model the assembly of business solutions from individual services, providing control over key aspects of the solution such as access methods and security.

Instead of architecting solutions that use standard portals and portlets—which often suffer scalability and performance problems due to inefficient communication between producers and consumers within the portal—look at architecting with a distributed cache layer. BEA WebLogic Portal™ provides an extension to the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) specification. When coupled with the Tangosol Coherence in-memory caching and data management solution, this extension enables data to be federated along with user interface and content for scalable, reliable, and highly performant access.

For more information and detailed examples of how you can share data among federated portals using WebLogic Portal, Tangosol Coherence, and WSRP, click here.

This archived Webinar features experts from BEA Systems, Plumtree, Sun Microsystems, and Vignette discussing topics that are important to Java technology portals, including standards evolution and architectural approaches. Led by Eric Knorr, InfoWorld's executive editor, this JavaOne 2005 discussion addresses the different approaches to the market and focuses on large customer endeavors and best practices. Topics include: How distributed should your architecture be for highly scalable and flexible portal applications? When should you use portal software? JSR 168, WRSP, Struts and JSF—which should you choose?

Successfully deploying SOA requires a unique set of skills, knowledge, and experience. BEA is committed to helping you develop the expertise you need to apply the BEA SOA Domain Model™ and reference architecture to enterprise-scale scenarios, and to deal with technical and organizational issues by using best practices, design principles, and industry standard organizational models.

BEA's SOA Enterprise Architecture certification program, tailored to architects who oversee the design of enterprise applications and infrastructures that leverage BEA technologies, consists of three phases. Successful completion of each phase is required to advance to the next. Phase 1, which tests your understanding of SOA concepts and BEA's SOA Domain Model and Reference Architecture, is available now. Phase 2, available starting in late December 2005, focuses on building your knowledge and application of the BEA SOA Domain Model and Reference Architecture. Phase 3, which will be available in mid-2006, has you present a case study to a group of BEA SOA experts, and tests your overall SOA knowledge and experience.