Hello <SOA> World!

As every new blogger, I procrastinated for long time about the idea of creating my own blog, and finally decided to do it. The reason I wanted to write this blog was to share my experiences and thinking around SOA (concepts, technology, and tools). I was thinking of coming up with a good starting post about fundamental concepts of Service Oriented Architecture and that�s when I started thinking more about founding principles and fundamental concepts of SOA itself.  This stimulated plethora of thoughts in my mind about meaning of "Services" and application of "Service Oriented" approach. My desire is to revisit, invest some thinking, and find what it really means and entails, other than being a hot buzzword?

My past experiences in Research, EAI and Message Oriented Middleware always overlapped the Service Oriented Architecture every now and then (even when it was not a big buzzword). My formal interest in SOA originated when I was doing research work for my graduate studies that involved designing service oriented architecture for resource constrained hand-held devices (mobile devices in simple terms).

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): Let's talk about it!

Service orientated architecture (SOA) is one of the most talked about approaches as it relates to software development and architecture paradigm. Is it just another "Buzzword"? Or does it entails something that can really change the way we think about  software architecture? No doubt, SOA has received good share of attention and press in last few years. I strongly believe that this is really good development for the direction of software architecture. To say that "SOA is revolutionizing the direction of software industry" would definitely not be an understatement!

What is so different about it?

The best I can answer it is, "Simplicity". Off course, that can not explain everything and does generates lots of follow-up questions. The most common questions people (customers, friends, and people I meet in flights) ask me are:

• "I have heard about it so much, but what exactly is SOA?"
• "What is a Service?"
  
• "What exactly do you mean when you say Service Oriented?"
• "What do you mean by Composite Services?"
• "What do you mean by Service Orchestration?"
• "What is different about Service Oriented approach for Enterprise Integration?"
  
• "How is one company's SOA different than the other?"

Whenever I am asked, I do answer the above questions very enthusiastically every time. But thinking about my answers (and my fellow SOA enthusiasts) again from a layman's perspective, I do realize that at times, all that the person might be getting is "same or more technical jargon" than he/she has already heard of or read about.

So while thinking about good fundamental answers that relate to real life and not just technical details, I have decided to take a step back, first revisit the concepts, zoom out and then share my experiences in the following posts...

Please feel free to write a comment by clicking on the comment link below.

-Peeyush Tugnawat