Back in November as part of my MSc. research I posed the
question "What is SOA?". The objective was to derive a definition of
SOA that I could use to inform the rest of my studied. Since then I
have received approximately 50 definitions of SOA from various
sources including from members of this group. First off let me thank
you all for the valuable and insightful input. When I asked the
question I also committed to being my definition of SOA back to this
group. Her it goes SOA in less than 100 words-
"SOA is a business centric software design paradigm characterised by
the utilisation of well defined standards and protocols to create
services and compose applications from services. SOA mandates that
services are loosely coupled and communicate through the exchange of
messages thereby allowing resource sharing and reuse.
Interoperability and platform independence allow the composition of
applications from services created using heterogeneous resources and
hosted on heterogeneous technology platforms. SOA is a long term
organization wide cross functional collaborative activity whose ROI
will be achieved by service reuse and efficiencies gained by better
alignment IT with business."
Please fill free to comment and critically review.
I am now looking at SOA adoption rates, SOA benefits realization
experiences and the relationship between the semantic web (web 2 or 3
or whatever it is now) and SOA.
Once again thank you for the input.
Selwyn Akintola
