What is SOA?

I'm Dan Farber, editor in chief of ZDNet, and today I want to talk about a term that I think has been very over-hyped, but it's also very important and that's SOA, or soa, or so what, because of it's over-hyped nature. Service-oriented architecture. So what we have here is services which is really built around web services. Orientation I'm not exactly sure what it means other than it means an association with Web services. It's oriented around Web services and very importantly architecture, that there's a framework around which these Web services are built, and that framework really could be termed as business processors, so that it's Web services in the context of business processes.

Now what makes this architecture work is the fact that you have on one end a provider, and on the other end a consumer, and these are loosely coupled, meaning there's not a lot of artificial dependencies between the two, and then they are connected through messaging and therefore they interact in a way that they can be loosely coupled and yet perform a function.

Now there might also be another part which would be a service broker up here and the broker would be a collection of Web services that can be called by the provider to bring over to the consumer. And in this framework, then it's very loosely coupled again. It's flexible. And it's not hard wired, and therefore you can build this composite applications and replace any service with any other service. So, for example if I need a service to do credit checking, I might have 10 services to choose from, and if they follow the protocols they should all work together.

So it's lower cost, easier integration, faster to change that's service-oriented architecture.