I'm Dan Farber, editor in chief of ZDNet, and today I wantto talk about a term that I think has been very over-hyped, but it's also veryimportant and that's SOA, or soa, or so what, because of it's over-hypednature. Service-oriented architecture. So what we have here is services which isreally built around web services. Orientation I'm not exactly sure what itmeans other than it means an association with Web services. It's orientedaround Web services and very importantly architecture, that there's a frameworkaround which these Web services are built, and that framework really could betermed as business processors, so that it's Web services in the context ofbusiness processes.
Now what makes this architecture work is the fact that youhave on one end a provider, and on the other end a consumer, and these areloosely coupled, meaning there's not a lot of artificial dependencies betweenthe two, and then they are connected through messaging and therefore theyinteract in a way that they can be loosely coupled and yet perform a function.
Now there might also be another part which would be aservice broker up here and the broker would be a collection of Web servicesthat can be called by the provider to bring over to the consumer. And in thisframework, then it's very loosely coupled again. It's flexible. And it's nothard wired, and therefore you can build this composite applications and replaceany service with any other service. So, for example if I need a service to docredit checking, I might have 10 services to choose from, and if they followthe protocols they should all work together.
So it's lower cost, easier integration, faster to changethat's service-oriented architecture.
