It seems that everyone is talking about making an SOA and how much it will improve their operations, yet most people are hard-pressed to define not only what an SOA is, but also to quantify what specific value it might provide to their organizations. Many simply assert that their SOA architecture comprises a group of Web services through which they can expose business logic over the Internet.

A service-oriented architecture is comprised of a number of different services that can be consumed by any number of clients. The only assumption made by either party is that communication takes the form of a well-defined and strictly enforced contract.

The purpose of this article is to describe a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in terms of the IT industry. Unfortunately, the term SOA doesn't really have a formal definition. In fact, many people believe that SOA means you have several Web services exposed to clients. Although this is not necessarily wrong, it's not the whole requirement either.

An SOA is much more than mere Web services. In fact, Web services are not a requirement for implementing an SOA; an SOA is about architectural refinement rather than the implementation of one specific technology. This means that an SOA converts your architecture from isolated systems into black box services that can be reused without modification.

To fully implement an SOA, you must move from a monolithic application development model to a publisher/consumer application development model. Developing software to utilize formal contracts and become autonomous removes the dependence on elements outside of the formal contract. Companies developing applications around a publisher/consumer model will find themselves with a flexible architecture, one that is able to provide a large amount of functionality without compromising the core of the system.

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