I'm all for simple, but not for the program and software bit :)
The RMs Service Oriented Architecture is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations. Might be a little formal but if you reword it to SOA is about bringing together different groups and the services they provide, it provides a consistent way to handle the complexities of getting distributed groups with different objectives working together. And a service? Its just a collection of "what we do". I've used one a few times about SOA and OO. OO worked because an object represents a real world "thing" SOA works because a service represents a real world "what we do". If we limit SOA to just software then its never going to scale up to the large enterprise problems. Steve On 25/01/07, Alex Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
One of my New Year resolutions is to try to talk in plain english, and not descend into a cycle of producing ever more abstract definitions. Abstract definitions that may be accurate, but have absolutely no value or meaning to a "normal" person in our industry. So here's my attempt at #51... An SOA is simply a software architecture based on services. What's a service? A software program that is intended to be used by another program. Alex Hoffman On 1/23/07, Selwyn Akintola <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 > > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > >
