Service Oriented Architecture

"SOA is like the Overland Travel, it is not the destination that matters - it is the journey."

Author: Bojan Vukasinovic

Service Oriented Architecture or SOA is an architectural style of an organizations' IT systems whereby applications are orchestrated and interact with each other by means of a service, including the web service.

This interaction between the applications takes place in the Enterprise Service Bus that forms the backbone of the SOA middleware, but ESB on its own does not form SOA. ESB is an event driven system based around XML and WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) standards in which services are invoked, routed and secured.

SOA also allows business processes to be defined and integrated with IT systems. This is done by means of Business Process Execution Language or BPEL, the language for describing a real business process where contributors to the process may be applications, web services or humans. Monitoring of the business processes is available for the business executives that allows a quick overview of running process is in a point of time, notifies its reports and more.

When implemented using correct methodology SOA brings value for money to the business, but in all other cases SOA will appear too expensive to adopt, implement and run.

SOA as a journey

SOA is like the Overland Travel, it is not the destination that matters it is the journey. SOA cannot be implemented as a project. It could take years from the time an organization starts implementing SOA until its fully SOA enabled. From point-to-point integration, to creating static services registered with ESB, to creating dynamic composable services supported by correct software, governance and methodology SOA represents a roadmap an enterprise would want to follow.