Avoid Redundancy! – Lessons Learned from SOA-fying a Monolith

One of the two main lessons I learned while SOA-fying our monolithic application was: Avoid redundancy. We started out implementing the data structures for our services by hand. This means, I had to create the same data structure over and over again in different systems. For example, a simple Webservice for reading a person from … Read more

SOAP is dead – Lessons Learned from SOA-fying a Monolith

I’ll continue my series of blog posts regarding the lessons we learned while SOA-fying our monolithic Adabas/Natural application with a more technical lesson: SOAP is dead. This may be a harsh statement, taking into account that we started out with Webservices based on SOAP and at the moment our whole infrastructure is based on it. … Read more

Test everything! – Lessons Learned from SOA-fying a Monolith

Another lesson we learned while making our legacy application ready for a service-oriented architecture, is this: Test everything. When I started out writing Flow services in webMethods Integration Server (IS), there was no (nice) way of automatically testing them. Although we were told multiple times by consultants, that there would be a test framework for … Read more

Make use of Diversity – Lessons Learned from SOA-fying a Monolith

One of the lessons we learned while SOA-fying our legacy application (an Adabas/Natural monolith, that is almost 20 years old) is: Make use of diversity. When we designed the central interface for our service modules, we made sure that developers with different backgrounds worked together on the design team. For example, we had older and … Read more