S³i offers both consulting and contract software development services covering all aspects of SOA and Java Web services development. Consulting services provide the direct assistance of experts such as company founder Dennis Sosnoski to help resolve specific problems in design and implementation. Contract software development services draw on a pool of experts in SOA and Web services issues, along with a wider range of skilled developers covering the full range of Java technologies. Establishing SOA in your company, building performant and interoperable Web services, and general XML processing concerns are just a few of the many problem areas where our consulting help can solve your problems.

SOA consulting

SOA isn't a technology, it's a philosophy. If you want to move your organization to a SOA approach to IT you need to be concerned with a range of issues that start at the management level and extend all the way down to how developers write code. The management issues include establishing budgets and controlling access to services provided across all departments of your organization. At the IT architecture level, the issues involve establishing common data formats, factoring shared services out of application requirements, and choosing between SOAP and REST technologies. At the project level, the issues are designing services for interoperability and flexibility, meeting performance requirements (including often unanticipated future uses of the service), and allowing for future extensions.

Many vendors have focused on SOA as a way of promoting products generally known as Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs). Although an ESB can play an important role within a SOA approach to IT, it's far from essential - especially now that higher level protocols such as WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-AtomicTransactions are becoming standard features of SOAP frameworks. These higher level protocols give you all the essential functionality for building enterprise applications from Web services components.

An ESB can still be a useful tool in an organizational changeover to SOA, especially in the short term. ESBs generally provide governance functions, adapters that provide Web service interfaces for components based on older technologies such as EJB and COM, and translations between different data formats. These are all useful functions to have available for your SOA development. But building around an ESB can lead to increased development costs in the long term, as well as a significant degree of vendor lock-in. There are often better ways of dealing with these issues than by signing over the basis of your organization's future development to an ESB vendor.

S³i provides both SOA consulting and SOA training services to help your organization deal with all these issues. We've followed the evolution of component-based systems through several generations over the last two decades, and are experts in the issues of XML and Web services that are at the core of modern SOA approaches. Contact us to learn more about our SOA support services.

Web services consulting

Web servics share much in common with older approaches for distributed programs, but also introduce their own unique set of issues. Many of these issues relate to the use of XML messaging for data transfer. XML is a wonderful mechanism for representing structured data, but it was not designed to be either concise or efficient to process. High overhead in terms of both transport bandwidth and processing time often results when XML is used without consideration of data volumes as part of the initial performance design. Fortunately, there are ways around these types of performance issues. In some cases a simple change of XML representation can give substantial performance gains. In other cases, using attachments for Web services provides a way to integrate data not easily expressed in XML.

The new generation of Web services frameworks coming into use in 2006 offer better ways of dealing with both attachments and higher-level functions built on top of basic SOAP services. They also provide new techniques for XML processing, including greatly improved support for W3C XML Schema grammars for XML documents. In the realm of Java programming, these new frameworks include JAX-WS 2.0 and Apache Axis 2.0. The powerful features of the new frameworks allow SOAP-based Web services to be used for enterprise applications for the first time.

S³i has specialized in working with XML since the late 1990s, and further specialized in Web services since 2000. Company founder Dennis Sosnoski partipated in the expert groups that guided the development of the new JAXB 2.0 and JAX-WS 2.0 standards in these areas, and is also active in several related open source projects including Apache Axis 2.0. Under Dennis's leadership, we provide you with help on all aspects of XML and Web services development using Java. Contact us to learn more about our XML and Web services support.