The Roadmap

There has recently been much activity and discussion around the acronyms of SOA and CAM, not to mention ITSM and ITIL. Transflow is releasing the TAMS Roadmap to clarify how future releases of TAMS will incorporate all these developments.

SOA

The computing age and the software that supports it fall into 3 eras: monolithic, distributed and Internet.

Monolithic software was all in one place but then distributed software came along and crept out onto local and wide area networks and today software can be spread worldwide through the Internet. In the monolithic age the invention of the subroutine revolutionised software development, in the distributed age it was 2 and 3 tier client/server models and in the Internet age it is web services.

The same powerful idea has driven these three revolutions. Whenever possible adopt a 'building block' approach to software development and create new applications from pre-existing software building blocks. Thus applications consist of a percentage (ideally, but rarely, 0%) of unique software and a percentage (ideally, but rarely, 100%) of building block software. To achieve this in a distributed or an Internet environment requires an SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) to be in place to provide a framework.

How complicated is all this? It isn't.

SOA and TAMS

Today's major applications are 'composite applications' consisting of many building blocks, often from legacy applications. TAMS is a Composite Application Management (CAM) tool that allows these applications to be monitored and managed in production by using core WSAM, or ITCAM for WebSphere, functionality (see the TAMS data sheet for details). In addition application portfolio tools (as ITIL calls them), such as Adam AppPortfolio, can be used to document the relationships between the various building blocks. These relationships can become quite complex since by their very nature composite applications use building blocks but they may also provide building blocks to other applications, or for use as standalone web services. The application portfolio is used to keep track of all this.