You remember CASE don’t you? There were and are very powerful graphically tools that, while providing a good way to create diagrams and track metadata, really could not generate anything of value. The notion kind of died over the years, albeit CASE tools are still around today, but serve a much more tactical role, typically program design.

Enter SOA, and the need for good architecture/design tools that can work from the bottom up, or the top down, providing a central place to manage complexiity Or, in other words:

Provide a high level visual design mechanism that's able to represent services found within a problem domain, and describe those services to the tool in terms of semantics and service description. These services would be tracked in an active repository, thus when services change the repository changes as well.

Define and diagram abstraction and composites from the service layer.

Define and diagram orchestrations or processes from both services and abstractions, and generate artifacts and code for runtime. That's it.

This would be "killer technology." I’ve seen a few tools that do bits and pieces of this, but no one tool that nails this. Thus, perhaps there is an opportunity for a new company, or better yet a few combine forces to get close to SOA design heaven.

I volunteer to test the beta.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on June 15, 2006 05:19 AM