There are a lot of different definitions of SOA floating about, but when you strip away all the suit-mumble, it's concepts every Unix person understands intimately: loose coupling, reuse and interoperability. The distinction between SOA and an API is a little fuzzy at the edges, but an example might clear that up: suppose you have something that can be queried to return customer contact information. In a traditional API, that's going to give you back a structured record and if something new is added to that record (like a new "PDA ip address" field), the API probably has to change along with the clients that use it. With a SOA implementation, the data is probably returned in XML, and a client happily ignores fields it doesn't need or understand. This decoupling is what makes SOA more powerful, but note that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with XML; any web service like chargen, daytime etc. is a primitive example of a service priented application.
IBM's book explores they why and how of deploying SOA. It's a high level look, the kind of thing you might use as research for a paper justifying your deployment to senior management. There are case studies, but again it's the 20,000 foot view. You might be a bit annoyed at some of the vagueness and feel a little bit like there's too much talking and not enough reality, but it's important not to miss the real strenght of the argument made: SOA is a superior way to deploy business applications and will be more easily modified as requirements change.
Enter your email address for automatic notification of new posts here
(be sure to whitelist 'feedburner.com' if you use spam filtering)

| Views for this page | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Today | This Week | This Month | This Year | Overall |
| 2 | 2 | 43 | 511 | 2,399 |
Have you tried Searching this site?
Unix/Linux/Mac OS X support by phone, email or on-site: Support Rates
This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more. We appreciate comments and article submissions.
Add your comments