Web services - SOA - Original Publish Find and Bind Paper

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An architecture for dynamic e-business Enter the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA [see Resources]). SOA is a conceptual architecture for implementing dynamic e-business. Today, most of the systems and applications running in the business world are made up of tightly-coupled applications and subsystems. The drawback with this is that a change to any one subsystem can causes breakage in a variety of dependent applications. This brittle aspect of existing systems is in part responsible for the high cost of system maintenance and the limitations around the number of trading partners one can manage. SOA is not a new concept. In fact, about a year and a half ago, HP's e-speak appeared with a marketing campaign built around a proprietary implementation of SOA. Due in part to its proprietary requirements, e-speak failed to make much of a market impact. As recently as February 2001, HP revamped their software strategy to embrace the coupling of distributed components via SOAP, but they remain partially proprietary on the service interface definition language (IDL) of their solution. Nevertheless, the potential concept of SOA was found to have merit by companies like IBM and Microsoft who recognized that for SOA to succeed where other distributed computing concepts had failed, it must be implemented on open standards. Thus, the recent cooperation between these companies on recommended standards like UDDI and WSDL. More on that later! Regardless of the implementation, SOA is comprised of three participants and three fundamental operations (see Figure 2).