+1. That's what I've been attempting to illustrate, though Mike has phrased it (via ZT statements) in a much better way than I.
"If however the point of interaction is a higher level business service contract, the individual integration points become less relevant." But still there and still important--without them, nothing happens. SOA is a form of integration. But integration is not the primary focus. Perhaps the objection to "SOA is integration" is rooted in the common use of integration capabilities: resolving syntactic and semantic differences between components. Does "integration" not exist when there are no differences between these? What if the end points resolved these differences internally (client A must create document Z as defined by service B's interface)? Is that not still integration, just accomplished by the end-points rather than an intermediary? -Rob --- In [email protected], "Nibeck, Mike" <mike.nib...@...> wrote: > > Zapthink has a very specific take on SOA and integration. They > state the following: > - One goal of SOA - Integration as a byproduct of Service > composition > > - One Goal of legacy integration: building Services to support this > goal, NOT connecting systems to address a particular business need > > Their primary point being that in a SO architecture, integration is > simply one of the steps or parts of a > composition, and it no longer gets seen as a distinct and separate > set of processes or technologies. In most cases, > integration efforts are designed to somehow "join" two or more > disparate systems. If however the point of interaction > is a higher level business service contract, the individual > integration points become less relevant. > > You will always have the need to interact with remote systems, and > the lower level details will still be very similar to traditional > integration efforts, but these efforts will exist in a larger > context, the service model, that will hopefully not be directly > impacted by the individual integration efforts. > > _mike
