Thomas Erl

Thomas Erl is a Canadian-born SOA-related author, public speaker, and entrepreneur. Erl helped define and popularize service orientation and SOA and is the founder of a vendor-neutral SOA training & certification program.

Background

Erl, of SOA Systems Inc. was the first to publicly publish research on service-orientation from an industry perspective. Erl defined eight specific principles of service design for service-orientation. These principles were published in 2005 in his book Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design, on the www.soaprinciples.com research site, and in the October 2005 edition of the Web Services Journal. In 2008 SOA and service orientation (and surrounding technology platforms) matured to the extent that design practices surfaced and the SOA community collaborated to produce a master pattern catalog dedicated to SOA. These patterns were published in SOA Design Patterns and on the SOA Patterns http://www.soapatterns.org/ research site. Erl introduced these design patterns and SOA architecture types in the August 2008 edition of the Web Services Journal .

Among SOA strategic benefits and goals, Erl emphasizes increased vendor-platform independence together with increased inherent interoperability, increased federation, increased business-technology alignment, increased organizational agility, increased return on investment and reduced IT burden. Erl´s view on interoperability is that it is a result of applying the SOA design principles, not a principle by itself. This differs from, for example, the European Union concept of interoperability, which establishes interoperability as a objective to be achieved by itself, and not SOA-related. Erl contrasts interoperability as a desirable inherent characteristic, with integration which has to be carried out when there is no inherent interoperability, as happens with silo-based applications.

Publications

Since his first publication in 2004, Thomas Erl has published - usually as collective work - several more books. All books are based on the one consistently formed concept of service orientation. Each book has a different angle educating and teaching the concept, the philosophies, history and other aspects of service orientation in perspective of the targeted audience. As a result designers, architects, programmers and governance authorities can read a book focused on their field of interest about a common denominator (Service Orientation) that is of interest to all. This way he establishes the interoperability which is a key value for service orientation. None of the books is hooked up to any vendor, and all tend to follow standardized (OASIS, W3C) specifications, explaining them, using them and educate them. All book texts are heavily evaluated and debated by the majority of the key players in the field, for correct vision and useful information, examples before publishing. All these publications about service oriented computing are listed and described on the publisher'ssite.

Thomas is the founding member of the SOA Manifesto Working Group and co-chairs the SOA Education Committee. He is also responsible for drafting the annotated version of the SOA Manifesto.

Bibliography

• Erl, Thomas (2004). Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services. New York: Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR. ISBN 0-131-42898-5.
• Erl, Thomas (2006). Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology & Design. New York: Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR. ISBN 0-131-85858-0.
• Erl, Thomas (2008). Principles of Service Design. New York: Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR. ISBN 0-132-34482-3.
• Erl, Thomas (2009). SOA Design Patterns. New York: Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR. p. 864. ISBN 0-13-613516-1.
• Erl, Thomas (Anish Karmarkar, Priscilla Walmsley, Hugo Haas, Umit Yalcinalp, Canyang Kevin Liu, David Orchard, Andre Tost, James Pasley) (2009). Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA. New York: Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR. p. 848. ISBN 0-13-613517-X.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Erl, Thomas (David Chou, John deVadoss, Nitin Gandhi, Hanu Kommalapati, Brian Loesgen, Christoph Schittko, Herbjorn Wilhelmsen, Mickey Williams) (2010). SOA with .NET and Windows Azure: Realizing Service-Architecture with the Microsoft Platform. New York: Prentice Hall/PearsonPTR. p. 912. ISBN 0-13-158231-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Contributions

In order to provide a structure and an understanding of the development of SOA projects, Thomas presented a methodology that is based around the analysis and design of services.

He is a regular participant of SOA Symposium (www.soasymposium.com) and Gartner conferences.

At the beginning of September 2010, the Nicaraguan government published a set of documents about proposed Interoperability policies and Interoperability Standards, (both in spanish) which link extensively Interoperability with SOA and include ample references to Thomas Erl´s work and in particular, to both the Service Design Principles and Patterns, as proposed standards for its public administration.

References

• Introducing SOA Design Patterns[Online]. Date accessed: 7 April 2010.

See also

SOA Governance<br\> Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)<br\> SOA Security<br\> Service-oriented modeling<br\> Web Oriented Architecture<br\>

External Links

SOA manifesto<br\> Annotated SOA Manifesto<br\> SOA Concepts<br\> SOA Glossary<br\> SOA Design Patterns<br\>

Category: Service-oriented (business computing) Category: Business Speakers Category: Living People Category: 1967 Births