The goal is to provide a set of general design patterns specifying a laundry list of best practices, functions, and policies that should be considered when deploying services-oriented environments, or performing functions to manage or support them.
For instance, a blueprint for an internal employee HR portal would cover elements such as specifying functionality, and administrative functions such as how to add and validate users, provide the right levels of help, maintaining the right levels of access control, and maintaining connectivity with source systems.
The effort is being spearheaded by Miko Matsumura, a technology and standards evangelist for Infravio, who previously held similar roles at The Middleware Company and Sun Microsystems Inc promoting Java. He got the idea after seeing the usefulness of the Java Pet Store while at Sun, which showed how the technology worked.
The blueprints are to leverage the SOA Reference Model, which provides a laundry list of functions that an SOA should include. According to Matsumura, early candidates for blueprints include policy management, governance and life cycle management, contracts, smart client profiles, and B2B scenarios.
The model for the work includes a design pattern for describing business requirements. It provides a recipe for what practices, features, and functions are necessary for building these services.
With Oasis having just given the go-ahead for the group, the initial meeting is to take place in September. Matsumura expects that a coupe subcommittees dealing with horizontal functions shared across SOA implementations, and vertical functions that are specific to individual sectors, will be formed.
