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Basically anything that is a Component is still treated as a global reference. Anything that is a Field is locally defined within the component that it appears. This should help reduce the number of classes that are generated by various tooling as the local elements will be mapped more directly to fields or attributes in the appropriate language.
The benefits of the design change will vary depending on tooling support. It is the hope though that the design change will help ease some of the integration burden. This is planned to be available to STAR members during the upcoming Draft and Milestone releases for STAR 5.3.2. Other community members will see the proposed design changes in STAR 5.3.4 in March 2010.
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Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is not a theory for Jerry Kelly, CIO at 3Com Corp., it is a practice that in less than one year significantly improved application developer productivity, data integrity, information delivery and B2B transactions.
When Kelly arrived at 3Com in 2006, he found an application environment, which he describes as "massive spaghetti-ness" with point-to-point integration sometimes being done to support a single transaction. Maintaining the connections for supply chain management, customer relationship management, B2B and human resources took up the majority of development staff time, he recalled.
"Fundamentally, CIOs need to understand the application portfolio thoroughly and how the applications in that portfolio interact," Kelly said. "Too often there are too many point-to-point contacts."
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The important point for HR IT stakeholders to keep in mind is that ESBs aren't magic. An ESB knows nothing of your business needs nor does it automatically create architecture to support those needs. In other words, ESBs provide infrastructure, not architecture. Those who implement ESBs outside a solid architectural foundation may find themselves adding to a pile of spaghetti versus making any real headway in rationalizing their use of distributed services.