Service Oriented Archietctures

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is more a concept and model than a technology. This model is fast evolving to become the basis for high-level application component reuse and promises significant benefits for its adopters. The industry trend toward this architecture is being fueled by the Web Services hype.

Applications that are written to embrace the Service Oriented Architectures model are easier to share and secure, allowing compartmentalisation of application logic and promoting component reuse across applications. By hiding the implementation details of a service from the consumer, management and maintenance of these components becomes simpler. Subsequently, aggregation of existing services into new services becomes a reality and affords IT departments greater implementation and deployment flexibiliy.

However, in this exciting new world of publishing and consuming distributed application services, the need to reliably share the underlying application resources and maintain data consistency between the loosely-coupled applciations becomes imperative. It is in this realm that transactions are fast becoming the necessary underpining of commercial Service Oriented Architectures.