SOA in Black and White.


There are many companies that at the moment are working in SOA initiatives oriented to develop and build new information systems centered in services, services composition and services orchestration. During the ride, on this rusty travel, raises several questions on the realities, business benefits, and facts behind this exotic word that everyone is speaking out there. On the following lines I'm going to try to explain the Facts and Realities behind SOA based on a couple of big real-life SOA projects where I have had the opportunities to work.

Before I start to introduce the Realities and Facts behind SOA, I want to tell you some basic principles:

- SOA is different to SOAP Web services.
- Webservices is just one of many ways to build and deploy a service.
- There are many technologies that can be used to build a SOA Service such as: RMI, CORBA, .NET Remoting, and any other RPC based technology.
- The real value behind SOA is “Connectivity & Flexibility”.
- SOA, BPM, BAM and ESB all of them are different buzzwords.
- SOA is much more that a technology approach for building new systems, it’s an architectural approach that aims to break the natural barriers generated by heterogeneous technologies that should be integrated for supporting the company’s real business needs goals and processes; and decoupled the business functionalities provided by the IT applications from the underlying technology.

Please take in mind the above principles for compiling ;) the following facts: