SOA in Practice

Glossary

This glossary lists the most important specific SOA terms used in this book. Because sometimes there is no common definition of SOA terms it also serves to define my view of terminology used in this book. Terms used in the definitions that are themselves entries in the glossary appear in italics.

See [WS-Glossary] for another glossary of the Web Services community.

Note that this glossary will be maintained on this book’s web site:

http://www.soa-in-practice.com.

Glossary

2PC (two-phase commit)

An approach for maintaining consistency over multiple systems. In the first phase, all backends are asked to confirm a requested change so that in the second phase the commitment of the updates usually succeeds. In accordance with the principles of loose coupling, in SOA compensation is usually used instead of 2PC.

Activity

Possible term for one step in a business process. In the context of SOA, an activity is typically implemented by a service.

Agent

A Web Services term for participant, which is the general term for a consumer or provider.

Architecture

According to [BassClementsKazman03], the architecture of a computing system is the structure or structures of the system, which comprise software (and hardware) components, the externally visible properties of those components, and the relationships among them.

Asynchronous communication

A form of communication where there is a measurable time interval between the sending and receiving of the content of any message. Message-oriented middleware ...