Understanding Service Oriented Architecture

Understanding Service Oriented Architecture: An article on familiar SOA at java.net . I liked the wrapping up sentence - "Service oriented architecture is a collection of ideas and patterns from the 1980s that survived the 1990s." Author David Walend has put together nice points about SOA.

As SOA is fast maturing, I see new definitions, challenges and ideas in the field. One of the major breakthrough will be giving systems choice to select most suitable service from a group of suitable services.

Till now Services have contracts with regards to messages. They specifies what kind of messages to they expect and what kind of messages they respond. These contracts still lack currencies with respect to time, cpu cycles and network bandwidth. Services are encapsulated and loosely coupled which makes SOA robust. Serives have independent life cycles and can be easily managed without breaking or stopping whole system. Orchestrator services are useful in workflow application. Assumption is orchestrator service already know most suitable service.