"Trying to build a SOA on only Web services will result in a poor imitation of a SOA," said Rob Gauthier, Director of Solutions Engineering at Tampa, Florida-based Skyway Software - founded by Jared Rodriguez and Dan Aegerter - when discussing service oriented architecture with SYS-CON.TV (http://sys-con.tv) host Jeremy Geelan at Web Services Edge 2005 East , held recently in downtown Boston at the historic Hynes Convention Center. 

"Designing a SOA is like any other task in engineering," Gauthier explained. "It's important to use the right tools and the right technology for the right jobs. Services in a SOA will vary from very fine grained to very coarse grained. Often, the coarse grained services will be consumers of the fine grained services. The coarse grained services themselves will also in turn be consumed, often by automated processes, enterprise applications and enterprise composite applications." 

View Rob Gauthier With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV 

Gauthier continued: "Any of these services can be exposed in a multitude of ways, for instance, some can be exposed as Web services while some are directly accessed through J2EE, RMI, .NET or other mechanisms.  Having a SOA does not mean that everything is a Web service.  In fact, trying to build a SOA on only Web services will result in a poor imitation of a SOA."

Web services are great in many ways, Gauthier pointed out, adding: "But if you are building an end-user application or high volume processes then Web services are far from the right choice."

"Web services are expensive in both processing and bandwidth. On average, a Web service invocation is 10 times larger than the binary form of such an object interaction. It is a simple side effect of using XML and SOAP versus Java or C#. This eats up huge chunks of bandwidth when dealing with large numbers of transactions."

One of Skyway Software's biggest customers is British American Tobacco, he said. "If every end user application invoked a Web services for its server interactions, the BAT Intranet would fall to its knees, and BAT has a top notch intranet. This scenario is true of almost all global 1000 businesses."

View Rob Gauthier With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV 

Skyway's model-driven approach to SOA, Gauthier explained, enables technologists to focus building business services. By eliminating the time-consuming process of manually writing code companies can drastically accelerate their solution development.

"Skyway generates 100% standard J2EE compliant code free from any proprietary extensions," he added. "The code free environment enables the ability to assemble and build services as composite or standalone applications in a matter of hours as opposed to days."

Company Background

Skyway Software was founded in 2001 by serial entrepreneur Jared Rodriguez along with Daniel Aegerter. Previously they had founded Tradex together, which sold for $5.4 billion in 2000 to Ariba. Continuing the approach of breaking new ground, Skyway Builder was the first product released by Skyway in 2003, targeted at providing a codeless development environment for SOA. The Skyway platform has been extended to encompass the creation, management and deployment of Service Oriented Architectures

Skyway's Inegrated Services Management platform solution is a unique and comprehensive platform, built from the ground up for SOA to build, deploy, manage and extend business level solutions, processes and services.

• OpenNebula and Xen Collaborate to Build OpenNebula Clouds on XCP