Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts and Implementation

In today’s increasingly competitive and technology-driven business environment, ability to quickly adapt its business processes in response to both internal and external changes is a must for any organization. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), along with its programming models, is one strategic option to accomplish this. SOA enables an organization’s business to drive its information systems design by enabling the organization to align its business processes with information technology (IT). SOA is an architectural style that supports integration of business processes as linked services that may be accessed when needed over a network. From the perspective of application developers, SOA is a set of programming models and tools for building, accessing, and assembling services that implement business design. This paper examines the role and benefits of an application development framework built on SOA foundation. In addition, it presents a programming model to build Web services, which is the most common approach used to implement SOA.