By now, you could probably pass a pop quiz on the characteristics and benefits of SOA. You've been to seminars and logged on to Webinars. But there's a big difference between understanding and building. This issue of Arch2Arch Advisor focuses on key resources that can help you bridge that gap.

For a drill-down on the details of building SOA infrastructure, register for our TechStart Seminar and check out Part 3 of our Successfully Planning for SOA series. And, if you haven't yet visited our SOA Resource Center, be sure to make that your first stop.

Meanwhile, an article on speeding application change and a specification and white paper on Service Data Objects round out this issue with information that's pertinent to other aspects of your system design.

Please note also that Dev2Dev™ Days, our roadshow of free one-day technically focused events, is gearing up to start in March. And, as always, your Arch2Arch Resource Center is the place for on-demand insight and guidance on architectural issues from industry experts.

SOA requires a core infrastructure that enables service provisioning, deployment, management, and lifecycle governance for control and ROI. To get you started on building your SOA foundation, this TechStart Seminar provides a proven, practical take on SOA with no sales or marketing spin. Held at six venues in the next few months, the Seminar discusses the requirements for a service integration and management backbone and takes a look at heterogeneous service end-points, standards, lifecycle governance, and Web Services management.

If you've been following our series on SOA planning, you've already learned the planning basics and how to create an effective SOA roadmap. In this final article we review the remaining three segments of the BEA Six-Domain Methodology: Building Blocks, Projects & Applications, and Organization & Governance, with a focus on how to integrate them into your long-range project planning.

SOA is great for making data available throughout the enterprise—but ultimately, it's only as valuable as the data itself. Service Data Objects (SDO) is a specification that can help ensure you're distributing quality data. Originally developed as a joint collaboration between BEA and IBM and now being developed also by Oracle, SAP, Siebel, Sybase, and XCalia, SDO is designed to simplify and unify the way in which applications handle data from heterogeneous data sources, including relational databases, XML data sources, Web services, and enterprise information systems.

Businesses need to respond quickly to a changing environment, which means applications must change rapidly too. Instead of embedding your business logic in Java code, use the rules engine in BEA WebLogic Portal® together with BEA WebLogic Integration™ to add more agility to your business logic. This article explains how to use the rules engine to boost real-time responsiveness to the needs of the business.

BEA Dev2Dev Days 2006 are free, one-day global developer events. This year's road show will begin in March, visiting more than 20 cities from San Francisco to Bangalore and London. Some of the topics that will be covered include:

• Web service enablement of business objects for inclusion in SOA
• Dynamic Web interaction using Ajax
• Portal-compliant Web presentation technologies like WSRP, JSR 168, and BEA AquaLogic™ User Interaction™
• Eclipse-based development tools like the BEA Workshop™ Studio plug-ins.