Hi Selwyn, I would say the first and last sentences are very good as a definition of SOA.
The second and third seem to me more like best practices guidance than part of a formal definition because they are addressing technology issues. Eric ----- Original Message ---- From: Selwyn Akintola <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 7:50:04 PM Subject: [service-orientated-architecture] Definition of SOA - an offering 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 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't get soaked. Take a quick peak at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#loc_weather
