Welcome to IBM Rational SOMA 2.9
IBM Rational SOMA 2.9 is a collection of practices for identifying and specifying services, specifying service-oriented solutions, and making decisions regarding how services will be realized.
Main Description

Overview

Rational SOMA 2.9 is a collection of four practices: 

The three service-related practices collectively support what we refer to as service solution design.  Their integrated use is more fully described in Developing Service-Oriented Solutions Using the Rational SOMA 2.9 practices

Essentially all successful service initiatives focus on tying the project artifacts back to the needs of the business.  We provide the Use Case Driven Business Modeling practice to help you produce some of the business-oriented inputs that are needed to start service solution design, if you do not already have these.

The current service solution design practices are based upon the predecessor RUP SOMA 2.4 content.  They also include substantial contributions from Building SOA Solutions Using the Rational SDP, including 12 SOA Architectural best practices ("patterns") which are woven into the fabric of the practices.

Guidelines for adopting the practices individually are presented in:

Lifecycle Models for Service Solution Development

IBM's service lifecycle model contains four major activity groups:  Model, Assemble, Deploy, and Manage.  The four Rational SOMA 2.9 practices all support the "Model" (earliest) portion of the lifecycle.  The practices can be used to support a number of service solution development lifecycle models, three of which are described in Guideline: Service Development Lifecycle Models. 

Rational SOMA 2.9 Workflow

We present a suggested workflow that incorporates the four practices, here. This particular lifecycle model is designed to support project-centric service development initiatives.  The previously-mentioned guideline describes how these practices can be used to support larger-scoped service efforts, as well.

Changes and Improvements

Principal changes and improvements in Rational SOMA 2.9 are:

  • Adoption of the Unified Method Architecture (UMA), which is compatible with the IBM Practice Library and makes it easier to reuse and extend the practices;
  • Elimination of substantial content that was not clearly focused on service design. Rational SOMA 2.9 is smaller, better organized, and easier to comprehend than was RUP SOMA 2.4.
  • Adoption of the Object Management Group's SoaML specification for modeling service-oriented systems.  Content has been cast or recast in terms of SoaML concepts and notations.
  • Service design advice and a service design process that are more detailed than RUP SOMA 2.4.  The detailed steps of the process generally conform to the process that is described in Building SOA Solutions Using the Rational SDP.  We have further changed some process details to leverage the most important constructs of SoaML.
  • New tool mentors that describe how to perform many of the design steps using IBM Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software, Version 7.5.4.  This version of the product provides a fairly rich set of SoaML-compliant SOA design accelerators, as well as an expanded set of transforms (UML-to-artifact, and artifact-to-UML) that support the SOA domain. 
     
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