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Mind the (Skills) Gap


Experts are beginning to recognize that there is a deficit in SOA programming skills

By David Worthington
February 15, 2007 — 
Some industry insiders are noticing that few developers have a firm grasp on the skills they require to migrate to service-oriented architectures and manage the complexity of accessing and manipulating data.

According to David S. Linthicum, CEO of Linthicum Group, as many as 60 percent to 70 percent of Web services can be classified as data services. As these data services become more common, the industry is gaining a nascent understanding of a need for a SOA data service layer, he said.

Most data cannot be proliferated and reused throughout a SOA as is. Data must align with whatever service developers want to provide. By aligning data forms to services, data becomes decentralized. A SOA data service layer is intended to encapsulate the messiness.

Composite Software CTO David Besemer told SD Times, “SOA must have four main components: registry, transactional, an orchestration layer and data services.” Besemer advised that data manipulation logic should not be embedded into business logic.

Modular programming is a familiar concept, but for many developers, cleaning up the mess could be an agonizing experience if their SOA programming skills are deficient for the task.

“The majority of today’s personnel do not have experience with SOAP, XSD, WSDLs XQuery or XSLT, and they may face a difficult transition,” Yankee Group analyst Laura Didio told SD times.

“[The skills gap] can impede and delay deployments among all but the most stouthearted bleeding-edge businesses,” said Didio, suggesting that corporations be ready to obtain the services of systems integrators and outsource if necessary.

Easing the transition to SOA is Composite Software’s main focus. Composite has identified demand for a data service platform as an opportunity it can use to differentiate its products. Its Composite Software tool set provides a graphical environment that is drag and drop within the SQL paradigm. All exposed data, including metadata, indexing and document data, is integrated as a layer.

“The big win is a framework that lets people do this in a way that they understand,” Composite’s Besemer said.

According to Didio, it will take time, resources and initial support to address the skills gap quandary. She advises that corporations contemplating a SOA deployment choose their vendors wisely. “Corporations contemplating a SOA data service deployment are well advised to choose their vendors with a careful eye on those that can assist them with design and development and provide excellent after-market technical service and support.”

She continued, “Early SOA data service adopters should also allocate the requisite time and funds to get their internal IT administrators trained.”

Didio forecasts that the SOA skills gap, and ones like it in, as she said, other “red hot” technology arenas, will diminish after mainstream adoption takes hold.


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