Java SOA Cookbook

Chapter 1. Introduction to SOA

Introduction

This chapter briefly introduces the landscape of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and illustrates some organizational challenges that SOA can precipitate. While you are likely familiar with a variety of SOA definitions, the solutions outlined in this book—and indeed, the construction of the book itself—are in some part predicated on a specific understanding of how we define the various constituent parts of SOA.

Heterogeneity is a fact of life in the modern IT landscape. There are hundreds of programming languages in the world, all used to write applications that populate the modern enterprise. Sometimes you need these applications to talk to each other, which can become a tricky proposition very quickly.

Aging systems written in languages with waning platform support must work in conjunction with applications written in disparate modern languages. These systems may have many apparent warts and wrinkles, and it may be tempting to simply rip out the systems and replace them. This can be prohibitively expensive, however, and rarely goes as smoothly as originally envisioned. It can also make you very vulnerable from an operational standpoint. These applications have stood the test of time. They have been vetted in the battlefield of daily use. And while we would like for our systems to look as neat and tidy as possible, many times what naive developers see as code sprawl is simply the reality of handling the many twists and turns and exceptional ...