Stefan -- Stefan Tilkov, http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/
On Nov 27, 2006, at 3:54 AM, Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
When I try to explain to "normal people" like my mother I say that SOA is an attempt to mirror the services economy: some organizations offer services, other organizations consume services, and some organizations offer services while consuming other services (composition). In the services economy there are all kinds of contracts involved with those interactions. SOA is an approach to building distributed systems by mimicking the services economy.Web services is basically the set of standards that have been created ontop of the Web to make SOA possible. No, that is not to say SOA is not possible with other technologies .. its not necessary condition but rather a sufficient one. To build SOAs then one needs: - the equivalent of English in the business world; the lingua franca everyone uses. That'd be XML, HTTP and SOAP in the Web services world (right now .. new technologies keep evolving- e.g., JSON is a validalternative to XML). It of course doesn't mean some service interactiondoesn't occur in other languages like French but that truly global interaction uses the common (maybe weaker ;-)) language.- ways to tell others what my services do so that they can find me. Thisis an alternative to natural language descriptions ala those found invarious advertisements. WSDL (and the like) along with various discoverymechanisms (I don't want to list the "U" thing because it sucks). - ways for others to find services and to find out their reputation, dependability etc.. The latter is of course unsolved yet for the most part. No real equivalent of the Better Business Bureau concept yet. To make this abstract stuff concrete, I usually compare to the Web and say that the Web has democratized information to the point that anyone from (say) Sri Lanka can produce globally visible information just asmuch as a major news company from the US can. Web services is an attempt to democratize *integration* by building a layer on the Web that allowsany computer to interact with any other computer easily using open standards that are supported by everyone. Sanjiva. -- Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D.Founder & Director; Lanka Software Foundation; http:// www.opensource.lk/Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.; http://www.wso2.com/ Director; Open Source Initiative; http://www.opensource.org/ Member; Apache Software Foundation; http://www.apache.org/ Visiting Lecturer; University of Moratuwa; http://www.cse.mrt.ac.lk/
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