A prototypical enterprise that works with the principles of a Resource Oriented Architecture.
Tired and dissatisfied of integrating the company's information sources with expensive, complex and difficult to manage proprietary enterprise integration software and web services, the Resource Oriented Enterprise (ROE) approached the problem with the concepts of the World Wide Web.
These concepts have proven to be extremely flexible, reliable and scalable. And these qualities are badly needed, because the ROE is like most enterprises today: an ever moving ecosystem with changing organisational structures, including acquisitions; deals with a multitude of external customers and suppliers; it is subject to new regulations; creates an unbelievable amount of data every day, and so on...
To model and support its real world activities, the ROE adapts an IT architecture based on the principles of the Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA). It relies on the proven concepts of the WWW, as denoted in the epochal doctoral thesis of Roy T. Fielding, commonly known as REST architecture style.
The ROE integrates its information with the power of HTTP and the Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs), implements it with commonly available and relatively low priced infrastructure and - most importantly - makes its business the big winner of a simplified SW architecture!
The Resource Oriented Enterprise - What is it?
Today, HTTP is heavily used in enterprises to transport data; however, it is not really appreciated as a complete protocol. All sorts of additional protocol stacks are written on top of it, thereby obscuring the real power of HTTP.
Thus, the first step when forming a ROE is to change our mindset: we must respect that HTTP is a full-fledged communications protocol that satisfies by itself the needs of almost all modern business applications. Applying HTTP in a consequent way, we can eliminate dozens of unnecessary software layers, taking many protocols as superfluous to trash, thereby simplifying the enterprise architecture. A Resource Oriented Architecture yields better to maintain, faster, and more flexible systems that require less IT resources. And URIs dramatically improve the addressibility of information fragements of any type in and outside the enterprise.
ROE in 30 seconds
Learn with this animation about ROE's central concepts here.
