There's no question that Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) will continue to lead the IT and business agenda. After all, an SOA offers a flexible, extensible, and composable approach to reusing and extending existing applications and services, as well as constructing new ones.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) could revolutionize the way we think about IT. Why is that possible? Because SOA finally has the potential to make the concept of reuse real. Companies have been talking about reuse for years, but have never been able to transform that talk into full-scale reality. Now, you might be asking, 'How can SOA succeed where previous approaches have failed?' Because the standards, best practices and governance models have finally matured to the point where reuse can actually work.

IBM Rational's six principles of systems engineering are a set of high-level systems development guidelines derived from the careful analysis of successful, complex systems development engagements over the past ten years.

In the first part of this series, I examined two factors that are essential for project success: compensating for lack of face-to-face communication and writing better use cases. In the final part of this series, I will outline two additional elements that are vital in software development.

Although there is no silver bullet that can protect your software development organization from all the challenges it might encounter in the course of a project, recognizing the importance of synchronization among all the different departments and functions within your organization will better prepare you for meeting every challenge that comes your way. A seasoned software development professional offers personal advice and describes best practices for improving project success, touching on communication, use cases, testing, and marketing.

In this article, WebSphere consultant Roland Barcia answers questions on developing J2EE and Web services applications on IBM Rational Application Developer V6 and deploying and testing those applications on WebSphere Application Server V6. Topics include using the various wizards, perspectives, and tools in Rational Application Developer to develop different types of J2EE applications, using the new Service Integration Bus Messaging Platform in WebSphere Application Server V6, differences from V5 of WebSphere Studio or WebSphere Application Server, using the default WebSphere Application Server V6 in Rational Application Developer, and deploying to full WebSphere Application Server V6 Network Deployment.

The need to respond to changing business demands with flexible IT solutions has led many businesses to service oriented architectures (SOAs). An SOA is an IT framework that combines individual business functions and processes, called services, to implement sophisticated business applications and processes. SOA is an approach to IT that considers business processes as reusable components or 'services' that are independent of the applications and computing platforms on which they run.

The IBM Rational Professional bundle can help your development organization to accelerate software development by integrating systems analysis, design, coding, and developer and systems test activities around a common underlying tool infrastructure. This simplifies the development team's ability to learn the tools and makes it easier for them to share information with the rest of their team. The bundle's built-in version control and integration with other team tools enable them to protect team assets, create and manage requirements, track quality-management efforts, and understand how a change in one project artifact could conceivably impact others.

There is a great synergy between the Rational Team Unifying Platform and the IBM development tools, such as IBM Rational Application Developer, IBM Rational Web Developer, and IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition. While WebSphere developers build, test, and deploy Web, Web services, and Java applications, their entire team needs to ensure the code they write is in line with the project requirements, that versions of their code are maintained, that they are timely informed when requests for change occur, that they are aware of the overall project status, and that the QA team is building test cases validating the code against the requirements set forth by the project. The Rational Team Unifying Platform unifies software development teams by providing guidance in how to write good software and on automating these best practices with tools.

There is often a gap between what the business needs are and what IT delivers. Modeling the business, and the directly related IT systems to it, helps define the most effective opportunities for automation. Business modeling also helps the development team get a head start by helping to identify system use cases and finding requirements.

A lot has been said about the opportunities presented by service-oriented architectures (SOAs), especially their ability to enable business flexibility in an interoperable, technology-agnostic manner. But little has been said about verifying the functional quality of these SOA applications. As many organizations start delivering their first SOA applications, they realize that the flexibility they're gaining dramatically impacts the way software quality has to be addressed. The days of well-known test configurations are gone. A successful SOA is always in flux, and flux is the enemy of quality assurance engineers!

Modeling can be an effective way to manage the complexity of software development. It enables you to understand and analyze your requirements, explore possible architectures, develop and communicate your designs, assess changes, and create robust, flexible systems. In spite of these virtues, mainstream software development has yet to take full advantage of modeling in everyday practice.

Most IT shops recognize the need for applying Java technology. So what keeps Java from becoming even more prevalent than it is today?

WebSphere Portal is all about the integration of users and administration, a common look and feel, and a standardized application programming model. With Portal, various back-end systems can be integrated to a common user experience. However, there are various cases where you will have several independent user populations and will want to provide a unique and distinguished look and feel to each of them. Each community will want to work with its own logical partition of WebSxphere Portal independent of all others.

Developing J2EE applications can be time-consuming and error prone, and deploying them for execution on an application server only adds to the complexity. Even a simple 'Hello World' Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) requires multiple files to be created and maintained in the correct locations.

The velocity of business is ever increasing, and business agility is at a premium. Companies are faced with a myriad of challenges such as managing service levels in a complex, heterogeneous environment, increasing resource utilization while maintaining availability and reliability, and reducing IT costs. Infrastructure management provides the capabilities to help simplify and optimize IT infrastructures so that businesses can respond with agility, flexibility, and speed.

In this Q&A, Tony Nadalin, chief of security architecture for IBM Software discusses ways in which companies can protect their mission critical data even as they connect their networks with outside partners.

Organizations are increasingly using thread pools to enhance WebSphere Application Server performance by providing users with required information quickly without monopolizing resources required for other commands.

Evolving J2EE specifications continue to provide developers and architects with added performance muscle and flexibility for building and optimizing enterprise applications. J2EE advances are both a boon and a challenge as they can provide additional capabilities while also requiring refined development skills. J2EE applications incorporate complex distributed logic and, hence, demand careful, intelligent, and innovative design and implementation techniques.

How well does your application perform? It is probably one of the toughest questions to answer accurately. It is not only a question of how many requests your application serves per second or per minute, but also how your application scales with respect to other performance metrics. It remains challenging to quantify application health quickly because there are a number of variables to consider.

Portals enable users, employees, customers, and suppliers to expand beyond their traditional boundaries by providing a single common interface to access globally dispersed content and applications. Most important, portals also allow users to communicate with other enterprise applications, content factories, and processes. Dynamic portal capabilities also provide personalization that enables users to create tailored views of information or receive customized content.

Performance tuning practices are sometimes based on the run-time characteristics of vendor-specific Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) or application servers. Because Java code will likely outlast the environment for which it is initially designed, developers must ensure that their code has the flexibility to adapt to new technologies and environments.

In a production environment, memory leaks can force organizations to add more memory and hardware resources. They can even cause an application to crash unexpectedly. In theory, Java memory leaks should not emerge as a development or production issue because the garbage collector is responsible for memory management.

As the gap increases between technology innovation and the constricted capabilities of inherited legacy systems, many organizations are evaluating the costs and benefits of migrating their infrastructures and enterprise applications to new generations of Web-based infrastructure technologies.

Computer security is an important aspect of any IT architecture. The requirement for security vigilance is especially critical, given the widespread availability of technology that potentially enables novice hackers to penetrate corporate IT defenses simply by using a tool available on the Internet.