Service Oriented Architecture
What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? There have been so many interpretations of this throughout the years that it seems important to establish a common understanding before I discuss WCF as an SOA platform. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, better known as OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org), provides this official definition in its Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture:
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains.
Tip
You can find the OASIS SOA Reference Model documentation at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=soa-rm.
You might add to this definition by stating that SOA relies on the ability to access chunks of business functionality, potentially owned by different applications, departments, companies, or industries. Notice that this description does not specify the mechanism through which those chunks of functionality are accessed. In fact, the term “service” isn’t even mentioned, although it is implied.
From OOP to SOA
The road to SOA has been a progressive one—driven by the need to improve how developers build complex enterprise systems. The principals behind enterprise system design are far-reaching: from object-oriented programming to component-oriented programming to service-orientation. All three approaches share the common goal of encapsulation and ...
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