Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Not So Simple SOA

In This Chapter

• Creating true flexibility with components

• The birth of Web services

• From Web services to business services to business processes

• Creating composite applications

• Dismantling application silos

"OK, if SOA's so wonderful, what's the catch?" you shrewdly ask. Like a lot of things worth having, SOA takes work and time — and it's really worth it. SOA represents a new world order in which business leadership and technology leadership together navigate the business challenges of the "All Technology, All the Time" era we inhabit.

If you want to be a part of this new world order, you have to have some fluency in the basic concepts. That's why we're here — to help you with those basic concepts. If you can remember back 10 or 15 years, you might not have known what e-mail was, and you had never surfed the Web — we know, some of us were writing The Internet For Dummies back then. For businesses everywhere, the concepts we're introducing now are every bit as revolutionary and important as the Internet was ten years ago, and we have confidence that when you're through with us (or vice versa), you'll be no dummy.

Components and Component Wannabes

Traditional software applications aren't very flexible. It's the sad truth. To be flexible — meaning to move and bend (change) and not break — requires malice aforethought (well, at least forethought) and some hard work. Flexible software is best built from reusable pieces of software code known as components. Well-written ...