SOA Explained

Service Oriented Architectures hold the key to the creation of truly agile IT environments – Agile in the true sense in that user needs for improved or new business processes are met within hours or days instead of weeks or months.

The concept is a simple one – monolithic legacy programs that cannot share their functionality are gradually replaced with small software components that each perform a task. The components are constructed so that they expose what they can do as a service – a service to be called upon as and when needed by any other component without the need for any specific integration. This “Loosely Coupled” arrangement means that every component can be re-used endless times in any number of business processes.

To become a realistic solution, the technology to be used has to be agreed so that companies can call each others services. The chosen technology for this is web services. This technology uses a standardised approach to the problem by specifying the messaging protocols to be used and the way each service is described. The message technology is SOAP and the service description is an electronic document called WSDL.