Leveraging Service Oriented Architecture: A case study for ocean energy information management

Often Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is implemented after an organization has an already established legacy set of applications and data formats. SOA is a powerful approach in that it can encapsulate and streamline data into a format that can be understood by an entire organization. From the executive department to the field office, data can be universally accessible. If there is a need to gather, consume, and create reports from data stored in a MySQL database at the field office with an Oracle database from the accounting department and a Progress database at the manufacturing plant, then you need SOA. This interconnection is not exclusive to databases, but rather any form or type of data for which there is a need to gather and compare data. Whether it is stored in various file formats from a Linux server, Solaris server or Windows server to an embedded device, then you need a SOA. This paper is an analysis of one SOA approach and the basic underlying network layers of it. Choosing and subsequently implementing a service oriented architecture for a large organization can be a complex undertaking, but Swordfish and Eclipse SOA, the new emerging SOA framework and integrated development environment, could mediate this. In this paper the eclipse SOA and Swordfish runtime framework are investigated and presented as a viable open source service oriented architecture solution for the enterprise.