Why everyone will be a 'programmer'

Database News - Wednesday December 12, 2007

SOFTWARE / SOA FOR SMALL ENTERPRISES

Why everyone will be a 'programmer'

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

Small and medium enterprises, the grassroots of the Thai economy, have much to gain from adopting an SOA (service oriented architecture) IT system in terms of agility and lowered costs, according to Manoo Oradeedolchest, head of ICT Policy at Sripathum University.

Speaking at the recent Bangkok ICT Forum, the former Sipa president also predicted that in a few years everyone in an organisation will become a "programmer" creating new business applications without the need to actually program in code.

Manoo explained that SOA depended on two things: location independence and loose coupling.

Location independence is similar to what happens when we visit an Internet web site - we do not need to know where the server that holds that web page is. Loose coupling means that unlike before, when we had to know exactly how the server works in a client-server architecture, programmers can build larger applications without needing to know exactly what is in the other modules.

This is similar to object oriented programming but rather than an object, the concept is taken to an entire business process. Businesses then connect to business services through a media framework, or, as some vendors call it, an enterprise service bus.

Someone creating an application then only needs to program the interface to capture the information and verify it, but all the other processes will take place elsewhere. Someone creating an accounting package only needs to do the data capture, and the processing can take place in an accounting service provider in Manila, for example.

"We want the grassroots, or as they call it in the west, the long tail, to take advantage of this world," he declared.

Loose coupling also means that services are described in business terms that business people can understand. Ultimately this will lead to the non-programmer creating new business services by matching together SOA processes and SOA resources.

For a factory, SOA means that instead of having to have 10 different software packages to interface with 10 different suppliers or clients, any supplier or client using SOA can work with the factory.

SOA also will mean drastically lower costs. This is because rather than having to customise a huge monolithic application which is very expensive, especially in terms of testing, users will extend an application by adding on a new service. Adding on small modules like this is much cheaper than customisation.

Manoo also noted that SOA does not necessarily mean computerisation. Many processes can still be manual and only interface with computers with an SOA wrapper. The same is also true for legacy software applications.

"In the past, when the PC came along, everyone thought that the millions of typists would soon be out of a job. But what happened is that instead everyone had to learn how to type in order to use a PC. The same will be of programming. Rather than becoming a niche, soon hundreds of millions of people will have to apply their domain expertise into new SOA-based software," he said.

Bangkok Post