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What is service-oriented architecture?

An introduction to SOA

By Raghu R. Kodali, JavaWorld.com, 06/13/05

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Page 4 of 4

Other QoS attributes such as coordination between partners and transactions involving multiple services are being addressed in the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction specifications, respectively, which are OASIS efforts as well.

SOA is not Web services

There seems to be general confusion about the relationship between SOA and Web services. In an April 2003 Gartner report, Yefim V. Natis makes the distinction as follows: "Web services are about technology specifications, whereas SOA is a software design principle. Notably, Web services' WSDL is an SOA-suitable interface definition standard: this is where Web services and SOA fundamentally connect." Fundamentally, SOA is an architectural pattern, while Web services are services implemented using a set of standards; Web services is one of the ways you can implement SOA. The benefit of implementing SOA with Web services is that you achieve a platform-neutral approach to accessing services and better interoperability as more and more vendors support more and more Web services specifications.

Benefits of SOA

While the SOA concept is fundamentally not new, SOA differs from existing distributed technologies in that most vendors accept it and have an application or platform suite that enables SOA. SOA, with a ubiquitous set of standards, brings better reusability of existing assets or investments in the enterprise and lets you create applications that can be built on top of new and existing applications. SOA enables changes to applications while keeping clients or service consumers isolated from evolutionary changes that happen in the service implementation. SOA enables upgrading individual services or services consumers; it is not necessary to completely rewrite an application or keep an existing system that no longer addresses the new business requirements. Finally, SOA provides enterprises better flexibility in building applications and business processes in an agile manner by leveraging existing application infrastructure to compose new services.

About the author

Raghu R. Kodali is consulting product manager and SOA evangelist for Oracle Application Server. Kodali leads next-generation SOA initiatives and J2EE feature sets for Oracle Application Server, with particular expertise in EJB, J2EE deployment, Web services, and BPEL. Prior to product management, Kodali held presales and technical marketing positions in Oracle Asia-Pacific, based in Singapore. Prior to Oracle, he worked as software developer with National Computer Systems, Singapore. He holds a master's degree in computer science and is a frequent speaker at technology conferences. Kodali maintains an active blog at Loosely Coupled Corner

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