Part 1. History and principles

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged over the past several years as one of the preferred approaches for systems design, development, and integration. Leveraging open standards and the ubiquity of the internet, SOA is premised on the notion of reusable services that correspond to self-contained, logical units of work. The promise is that these services can be quickly pieced together using common patterns to form new applications that are tightly aligned with the needs of the business. The upshot? Improved business agility and cost-effective utilization of IT resources and assets.

In part 1, we’ll examine the history behind SOA and explore some of the commonalities that it shares with earlier architectural and technology approaches. We’ll then identify some of the core characteristics of SOA, and explain how they’re manifested in actual technologies that can be used in your own enterprise. Collectively, these technologies will combine to form what we are calling the Open SOA Platform. Once these technologies, such as business process management (BPM), are identified, our attention will turn to surveying the landscape of possible open source products that can be used to satisfy these technology requirements.