SOA

SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) a paradigm for design, development, deployment and management of a loosely coupled business application infrastructure. It provides a uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use capabilities to produce desired effects consistent with measurable preconditions and expectations. In this framework, business functionality is published, discovered, and consumed as part of a business ecosystem of network-aware and reusable technical and business services.

We believe that SOA can help businesses respond more quickly and cost-effectively to the changing market conditions. This style of architecture promotes reuse at the macro (service) level rather than micro levels (eg. Objects). It can also simplify interconnection to and usage of existing IT (legacy) assets.

In some respects, SOA can be considered an evolution in architecture, not a revolution. It captures many of best practices or actual use of the architectures that came before it. In communications systems, for example, there has been little development in recent years of solutions that use truly static bindings to talk to other equipment in the network, but by formally embracing an SOA approach, solutions are better positioned to stress the importance of well-defined, highly interoperable interfaces. This should greatly decrease integration costs and allow for much more dynamic solutions to be deployed.

Drilling into these concepts we can see that there is a set of basic capabilities that are required to achieve the potential benefits of SOA. Virgil implemented a number of these guiding principals, amongst which are:

Reuse - the ablility to encapsulate and expose coarse grained business functions as services
Loose - coupling - ensuring that service consumers are sufficiently abstracted from the physical implementation of a service
Identification and categorization (discoverability) - making sure that potential consumers can find the services they need

The fundamental principals lead to a natural order of activities an organization must complete to incrementally realize the benifits of service oriented architecture

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