What Is SOA Anyway: Part V, Summary

Looking at the SOA definition in Part IV, you can see it puts a lot of emphasis on interface.

Starting from the messages which are the parts of the interface, the contract which is the collection of the messages, the endpoint where the contract is delivered and the policy which governs the behavior of the endpoint. Thus SOA has a total of four different components that deal with the interface versus, for example, OO which only has one. The focus on interfaces is what gives SOA the ability to create loose coupling, composable components, reuse and achieve the various design goals. Another nice attribute of this definition is that we can use as a base for both the technical and the business perspectives of SOA as the common elements of both perspective are used in this definition.

Thus, even though there are a lot of misconceptions and hype surrounds SOA, there is value in the term. Multiple definitions do not have to translate to ambiguity if they are just different workings for the same concepts. We do however have to be careful not to be fooled by the hype and misconceptions. I hope that the definition provided here helps achieve this goal.

You can also download all the five parts as a single document from my site (670K PDF).

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 04:46 AM  Permalink