Home > Service-Oriented Computing in the Real World > Services as Web Services
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It is very important to view and position SOA as an architectural model that is agnostic to any one technology platform. By doing so, an enterprise is given the freedom to continually pursue the strategic goals associated with service-oriented computing by leveraging future technology advancements. In the current marketplace, the technology platform most associated with the realization of SOA is Web services.
Figure: Service-oriented solutions can be comprised of services built as Web services, components, or combinations of both.
The popularity of Web services preceded that of service-oriented computing. As a result, their initial use was primarily within traditional distributed solutions wherein they were most commonly used to facilitate point-to-point integration channels. As the maturity and adoption of Web services standards increased, so did the scope of their utilization.
With service-oriented computing comes a distinct architectural model that has been positioned by the vendor community as one that can fully leverage the open interoperability potential of Web services, especially when individual services are consistently shaped by service-orientation. For example, when exposing reusable logic as Web services, the reuse potential is significantly increased. Because service logic can now be accessed via a vendor-neutral communications framework, it becomes available to a wider range of service consumer programs.
Additionally, the fact that Web services provide a communications framework based on physically decoupled service contracts allows a service contract to be fully standardized independently from its implementation. This facilitates a potentially high level of service abstraction while providing the opportunity to fully decouple the service from any proprietary implementation details. As explored at www.soaprinciples.com, all of these characteristics are desirable when pursuing key principles, such as Standardized Service Contracts, Service Reusability, Service Loose Coupling, Service Abstraction, and Service Composability.
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